Book Image

Hands-on Nuxt.js Web Development

By : Lau Tiam Kok
Book Image

Hands-on Nuxt.js Web Development

By: Lau Tiam Kok

Overview of this book

Nuxt.js is a progressive web framework built on top of Vue.js for server-side rendering (SSR). With Nuxt.js and Vue.js, building universal and static-generated applications from scratch is now easier than ever before. This book starts with an introduction to Nuxt.js and its constituents as a universal SSR framework. You'll learn the fundamentals of Nuxt.js and find out how you can integrate it with the latest version of Vue.js. You'll then explore the Nuxt.js directory structure and set up your first Nuxt.js project using pages, views, routing, and Vue components. With the help of practical examples, you'll learn how to connect your Nuxt.js application with the backend API by exploring your Nuxt.js application’s configuration, plugins, modules, middleware, and the Vuex store. The book shows you how you can turn your Nuxt.js application into a universal or static-generated application by working with REST and GraphQL APIs over HTTP requests. Finally, you'll get to grips with security techniques using authorization, package your Nuxt.js application for testing, and deploy it to production. By the end of this web development book, you'll have developed a solid understanding of using Nuxt.js for your projects and be able to build secure, end-to-end tested, and scalable web applications with SSR, data handling, and SEO capabilities.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Section 1: Your First Nuxt App
5
Section 2: View, Routing, Components, Plugins, and Modules
10
Section 3: Server-Side Development and Data Management
14
Section 4: Middleware and Security
17
Section 5: Testing and Deployment
20
Section 6: The Further Fields

Nuxt as a single-page app

Nuxt is well-suited for developing single-page apps if you have any reason that prevents you from using Nuxt as a server-side rendering app. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Nuxt comes with two modes for developing your app: universal and spa. This means you just have to specify spa in the mode property in your project configuration, which we'll explore in more detail in the next chapter.

So, you might be thinking that if we can use Nuxt for developing a SPA, then why bother with Vue anymore? In fact, the SPA you can develop from Nuxt is slightly different from the SPA from Vue. The SPA you build from Vue is a traditional SPA, while the SPA from Nuxt is a "static" SPA (let's refer to it as Nuxt SPA) your app pages are pre-rendered at build time. This means deploying a Nuxt SPA is technically the same as statically generating a Nuxt universal SSR app both require the same Nuxt command: nuxt generate.

This can be confusing and you may want to ask what is the difference between the static-generated SSR app and the static-generated SPA? The difference is very obvious the static-generated SPA has no page content compared to the static-generated SSR app. The static-generated SPA is pre-rendered with your app pages and "empty" HTML, just like the traditional SPA – devoid of page content. This is confusing, but rest assured, we will figure all this out in the upcoming chapters of this book. In particular, you learn about the trade-offs of developing SPAs in Nuxt and how to overcome them.

You'll learn how to develop a Nuxt SPA and generate a static Nuxt SPA with a remote API in Chapter 15, Creating an SPA with Nuxt.