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

Gathering requirements


Now that we understand the workflow, let's put it into practice!

We begin byselecting a small portion of our application and defining its requirements. We picked the Create User feature because many other features depend on it. Specifically, the feature requires us to create an API endpoint, /users, that accepts POST requests, and stores the JSON payload of the request (representing the user) into a database. In addition, the following constraints should be applied:

  • The user payload must include the email address and password fields
  • The user payload may optionally provide a profile object; otherwise, an empty profile will be created for them

Now that we have our requirements, let's write our specification as E2E tests, using a tool called Cucumber.