Book Image

Hands-On JavaScript High Performance

By : Justin Scherer
1 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On JavaScript High Performance

1 (1)
By: Justin Scherer

Overview of this book

High-performance web development is all about cutting through the complexities in different layers of a web app and building services and APIs that improve the speed and performance of your apps on the browser. With emerging web technologies, building scalable websites and sustainable web apps is smoother than ever. This book starts by taking you through the web frontend, popular web development practices, and the latest version of ES and JavaScript. You'll work with Node.js and learn how to build web apps without a framework. The book consists of three hands-on examples that help you understand JavaScript applications at both the server-side and the client-side using Node.js and Svelte.js. Each chapter covers modern techniques such as DOM manipulation and V8 engine optimization to strengthen your understanding of the web. Finally, you’ll delve into advanced topics such as CI/CD and how you can harness their capabilities to speed up your web development dramatically. By the end of this web development book, you'll have understood how the JavaScript landscape has evolved, not just for the frontend but also for the backend, and be ready to use new tools and techniques to solve common web problems.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Understanding the DOM-less world

As we stated in the introduction, Node.js came out of the idea that if we are writing code in the browser, then we should be able to run it on the server. Here, we have a single language for both contexts and we don't have to context switch when we work on either section.

Node.js can function in this way with a mixture of two libraries. These libraries are V8, which we should already be familiar with, and libuv, which we aren't currently familiar with. The libuv library gives us asynchronous I/O. Every OS has a different way of handling this I/O, so libuv gives us a nice C wrapper around all of these instances.

The libuv library queues up requests for I/O onto a stack of requests. Then, it farms them out to a certain amount of threads (Node.js utilizes four by default). Once the responses come back from these threads, libuv will put them...