Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fifth Edition

By : David Herron
Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fifth Edition

By: David Herron

Overview of this book

Node.js is the leading choice of server-side web development platform, enabling developers to use the same tools and paradigms for both server-side and client-side software. This updated fifth edition of Node.js Web Development focuses on the new features of Node.js 14, Express 4.x, and ECMAScript, taking you through modern concepts, techniques, and best practices for using Node.js. The book starts by helping you get to grips with the concepts of building server-side web apps with Node.js. You’ll learn how to develop a complete Node.js web app, with a backend database tier to help you explore several databases. You'll deploy the app to real web servers, including a cloud hosting platform built on AWS EC2 using Terraform and Docker Swarm, while integrating other tools such as Redis and NGINX. As you advance, you'll learn about unit and functional testing, along with deploying test infrastructure using Docker. Finally, you'll discover how to harden Node.js app security, use Let's Encrypt to provision the HTTPS service, and implement several forms of app security with the help of expert practices. With each chapter, the book will help you put your knowledge into practice throughout the entire life cycle of developing a web app. By the end of this Node.js book, you’ll have gained practical Node.js web development knowledge and be able to build and deploy your own apps on a public web hosting solution.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Node.js
6
Section 2: Developing the Express Application
12
Section 3: Deployment

Summary

We covered a lot of territory in this chapter and looked at three distinct areas of testing: unit testing, REST API testing, and UI functional tests. Ensuring that an application is well tested is an important step on the road to software success. A team that does not follow good testing practices is often bogged down with fixing regression after regression.

First, we talked about the potential simplicity of simply using the assert module for testing. While the test frameworks, such as Mocha, provide great features, we can go a long way with a simple script.

There is a place for test frameworks, such as Mocha, if only to regularize our test cases and to produce test results reports. We used Mocha and Chai for this, and these tools were quite successful. We even found a couple of bugs with a small test suite.

When starting down the unit testing road, one design consideration is mocking out dependencies. But it's not always a good use of our time to replace every dependency...