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

Summary


In this chapter, we coerced you into following TDD principles when developing your application. We used Cucumber and Gherkin to write our end-to-end test, and used that to drive the implementation of our first endpoint. As part of our refactoring efforts, we've also migrated our API to use the Express framework.

At this point, you should have the TDD process drilled into your brain: Red. Green. Refactor. Begin by writing out test scenarios, implementing any undefined steps, then run the tests and see them fail, and finally, implementing the application code to make them pass. Once the tests have passed, refactor where appropriate. Rinse and repeat.

It's important to remember that TDD is not required to have self-testing code. You can, without following TDD, still write tests after to verify behavior and catch bugs. The emphasis of TDD is that it translates the design of your system into a set of concrete requirements, and uses these requirements to drive your development. Testing is...