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

Getting started with React


As mentioned earlier, although React itself is quite simple, the ecosystem around it can be a little overwhelming. Tessa Thorton, a former senior front-end developer for Shopify, once wrote a blog post titled How to learn web frameworks (ux.shopify.com/how-to-learn-web-frameworks-9d447cb71e68) In it, she reminded us that "Frameworks don’t exist to impress people or make your life harder. They exist to solve problems."

This reminds me of the first ever application I ever built, a clone of Amazon. It was built completely in vanilla JavaScript and PHP because I didn't even know there were frameworks available! However, there was a piece of animation I couldn't get right, and after Googling a lot (and finding the paradise that is Stack Overflow), I ended up using jQuery.

For learning how to program, this was not a bad strategy. It allowed me to understand what is possible without frameworks, and appreciate the framework more when I do use it.

Most tutorials will ask you...