Book Image

Hands-on JavaScript for Python Developers

By : Sonyl Nagale
Book Image

Hands-on JavaScript for Python Developers

By: Sonyl Nagale

Overview of this book

Knowledge of Python is a great foundation for learning other languages. This book will help you advance in your software engineering career by leveraging your Python programming skills to learn JavaScript and apply its unique features not only for frontend web development but also for streamlining work on the backend. Starting with the basics of JavaScript, you’ll cover its syntax, its use in the browser, and its frameworks and libraries. From working with user interactions and ingesting data from APIs through to creating APIs with Node.js, this book will help you get up and running with JavaScript using hands-on exercises, code snippets, and detailed descriptions of JavaScript implementation and benefits. To understand the use of JavaScript in the backend, you’ll explore Node.js and discover how it communicates with databases. As you advance, you’ll get to grips with creating your own RESTful APIs and connecting the frontend and backend for holistic full-stack development knowledge. By the end of this Python JavaScript book, you’ll have the knowledge you need to write full-fledged web applications from start to finish. You’ll have also gained hands-on experience of working through several projects, which will help you advance in your career as a JavaScript developer.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Section 1 - What is JavaScript? What is it not?
6
Section 2 - Using JavaScript on the Front-End
13
Section 3 - The Back-End: Node.js vs. Python
20
Section 4 - Communicating with Databases

Summary

While our focus has mostly been on getting away from Python by choosing Node.js and Express over Python and Django, it's definitely workable to integrate them. We used one specific paradigm here: a React app sitting as a static built app inside a Django app. The Django application is routing HTTP requests either to the API bot app if it has /api in the URL, or to the React react-frontend app for everything else.

Incorporating Django with React isn't really the easiest thing in the world, and this is only one possible paradigm of how to couple this, in what I'd term tightly-coupled scaffolding. If we were to have our React and Django apps completely separate and only interacting via XHR calls with Ajax, that would arguably be a more true-to-life scenario. However, that would involve having separate setups for the two halves, and today what we constructed was a single server for our whole application.

In the next chapter, we'll be working with Express and React...