Book Image

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

By : Daniel Li
Book Image

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

By: Daniel Li

Overview of this book

With the over-abundance of tools in the JavaScript ecosystem, it's easy to feel lost. Build tools, package managers, loaders, bundlers, linters, compilers, transpilers, typecheckers - how do you make sense of it all? In this book, we will build a simple API and React application from scratch. We begin by setting up our development environment using Git, yarn, Babel, and ESLint. Then, we will use Express, Elasticsearch and JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to build a stateless API service. For the front-end, we will use React, Redux, and Webpack. A central theme in the book is maintaining code quality. As such, we will enforce a Test-Driven Development (TDD) process using Selenium, Cucumber, Mocha, Sinon, and Istanbul. As we progress through the book, the focus will shift towards automation and infrastructure. You will learn to work with Continuous Integration (CI) servers like Jenkins, deploying services inside Docker containers, and run them on Kubernetes. By following this book, you would gain the skills needed to build robust, production-ready applications.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
The Importance of Good Code
Index

Picking a front-end framework/library


As we've already discussed in Chapter 2The State of JavaScriptsingle-page applications (SPAs) are a great improvement over the more traditional multi-page applications (MPAs) that uses a client-server architecture. With SPAs, a lot of the logic that was traditionally done on the server has been delegated to the client. This means there'll be less load on the server, and the application can respond more quickly to user interaction. Therefore, for our client application, we will be building an SPA. Now, the next step is to pick a technology stack for our SPA.

Vanilla JavaScript vs. frameworks

SPAs are often discussed in conjunction with popular frameworks and libraries, such as AngularJS/AngularReactVue.jsEmber, and Meteor; but we should remember that SPAs can be written with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript alone. We may also choose to employ utility libraries, such as jQuery, to abstract away prickly web APIs, such as XMLHttpRequest, and to...