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One thing that separates a good company from a great company is their processes. In a great company, everyone understands what is expected of them, what they can expect from others, the vision of the company, and the philosophy of the workplace. With that foundation, the staff has the freedom to be creative and innovate, working within the processes and boundaries set by the company.

When there are no processes, there is chaos. Developers wouldn't know what to expect— are the requirements and specifications documented? Where can I find them? They also wouldn't understand what's expected of them—do I need to write tests or is this a Proof of Concept (PoC)? What edge cases should I test for? Without processes, managers and developers will waste time chasing requirements and clarifications, giving them less time to be creative and innovative, and thus excel at their jobs.

Ultimately, a chaotic environment leads to a product that's lower in quality. On the technical side, there'll be more technical debt—bugs and inefficiencies that need to be fixed later. The product team will suffer too, as fewer features would be delivered.

For these companies, the best way to improve is simply to start implementing robust processes on the technical level by implementing Test-Driven Development (TDD), and on the management level by adopting Agile principles and/or implementing the Scrum framework. In this chapter, we will focus on the technical aspect—implementing TDD. Specifically, we will cover the following:

What is technical debt?
What are the causes and consequences of technical debt?
Reducing technical debt by implementing TDD

Key benefits

Create production-grade JavaScript applications from scratch

Build microservices and deploy them to a Docker container for scaling applications

Test and deploy your code with confidence using Travis CI

Description

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.

What you will learn

Practice Test-Driven Development (TDD) throughout the entire book

Use Cucumber, Mocha and Selenium to write E2E, integration, unit and UI tests

Build stateless APIs using Express and Elasticsearch

Document your API using OpenAPI and Swagger

Build and bundle front-end applications using React, Redux and Webpack

Containerize services using Docker

Deploying scalable microservices using Kubernetes

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Frequently bought together

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

S$66.99

Modern JavaScript Web Development Cookbook

S$66.99

S$44.99

Total S$ 178.97

D. Finkenzeller Jun 20, 2019

Just finished my first bash script that sets up a test environment and Elasticsearch DB then uses cucumber to run automated tests on my Javascript code that uses babel and express. Never thought I’d say that. To make things a little harder for myself I’m also going through this book on a Mac; hence why I had to write my own bash script instead of using the supplied version. I’m loving the way the author leads you through the topics and it’s mostly making sense. I’ve not done a great deal of Javascript before and only dabbled in TDD using Pester on PowerShell v3, and my grasp of git was poor. But I’m making great headway even managing to understand where I go wrong and recover without too much trouble.

Amazon Verified review

erick lestrange Dec 25, 2018

re editado: el temario de deployment es oro puro, y el de docker tiene muy buena pinta, le doy 5 estrellas porque aunque el repositorio sea un asco, el libro me ha enseñado muchas cosas que no tenia ni idea de como funcionaban como nginx, los pasos que sigue un registro de dominio hasta la ip etc... y eso que vengo de otros idiomases una idea estupenda de libro y aprendes bastante aunque super leeeento en tests y errores pero bueno eso es asi y punto. el problema es que el github es una chapuza horrible, los codigos estan incompletos, el autor ni se pasa a mirar los commits, hay solo unos pocos temas que ni siquiera estan bien numerados etc...hay otras cosas que son malas pero que ya estoy acostumbrado de los libros de packt como por ejemplo que el vocabulario del final del libro sea totalmente inexistente etc

Just Some Guy Mar 15, 2022

This is a great book, much better than I expected. TL;DR – It's a ~700 page tutorial which will use your existing JS dev skills to teach you everything you really need to properly build and deploy a simple app to Kubernetes.First off, there are prerequisites you really must already know: JavaScript (ES6) and Linux + Shell Scripting (i.e. bash). The book does nothing to explain those, at all, so if you don't already understand them you'll be lost and it'll be really hard to get very far.The author also does only quick intro overviews of the essential JS libraries you'll need – Node, Express, React, Redux – so don't read this to learn those. You'd best have at least a basic understanding of all before you approach this book (his intros aren't bad, they're just not nearly enough).NOTE: I read this in 2022, and so Node 8 and React 16 are already ancient, but that's not really a problem - since those libs aren't actually the emphasis of this book. Here's why...If you have those foundational technologies covered and are ready for more, this book is basically a really long, detailed tutorial. It starts from scratch and builds a basic full-stack app, from start to finish. The app itself is laughably simple, but learning app design patterns is NOT the point of this book. This book is about connecting all the operational pieces a developer needs to create and deploy an app, end-to-end.The author promotes and explains a nice Test-Driven Development workflow (TDD) using Cucumber, Mocha, etc. - helps you get a minimal Elasticsearch database up and running, then pretty much skims over using Node and Express to write a simple API server. None of that is particularly unique to this book (most tutorial books cover those things).Where I think this book shines is that it then does a nice job explaining a bunch of other real-world operational stuff that is required to deploy an app, but isn't strictly about writing code, including:- A pretty good intro to basic Continuous Integration (CI), using both Travis, and then Jenkins- Documenting your API, and making that doc public using OpenAPI and Swagger- Configuring the DNS records to get your domain live on a public web host- Implementing JWT-based Authentication from scratch in Node (not just using some 3rd party auth lib)At every step he includes solid code examples with detailed explanations, and explains various pro/con tradeoffs and gotchas to watch out for (super helpful real-world production tips). He also continuously refactors the TDD test-suite along the way. The bash and package.json scripts he includes are also actually much better than most similar tutorials I've read, so I'm gonna call them out again.He does a pretty fast overview of React and Redux, so you should probably be comfortable with those before approaching this book. He does, however, do a nice job of explaining how to run automated UI tests via Selenium, which is more than most generalist JS books cover.Where this book delivers the most surprising value, imho, is his explanation of Docker and Kubernetes. Those are massive topics, and you should definitely read dedicated books on each if you want to really learn them. But I've read a ton on each, and this book does a much better job than most non-dedicated books I've read at introducing each technology (how it works, why it's important, etc.), as well as how to integrate it into your production stack and deploy an app to a real hosted K8s cluster. Of particular note - the author explains how to set up an Elasticsearch _cluster_ in k8s using a StatefulSet and persistent storage - which is a fairly complex topic which many dedicated k8s books don't even cover, so bravo for that!One final note - although the book is over 700 pages long it does include just tons of screenshots and in-line code samples (all actually useful and nicely formatted, etc.), so it comes down to more like ~450 pages of actual reading. It's a lot to take in, but I was able to breeze through it much faster than I expected.SO - it's now a few years old, but to my surprise and relief, the value of this book definitely still holds up and is worth the ticket price. I give it 5 stars! :-)

Einar Mar 21, 2020

This book is packed with useful information on pretty much every aspect of developing a full stack javascript application from start to finish. There's no fluff, just very valuable and thoughtful content on every page written in a very readable style.I'd say it's not for beginners. Rather it's for someone who has gotten his hands dirty with web development or has just graduated CS or something like that and now wants to get to know the tools and best practices.Although I just read it I am already going back to some pages for reference when developing software.Highly recommend.

Amazon Customer Aug 17, 2019

As a novice self-taught programmer, I really appreciate this type of breadth-first book that offers brief coverage of many different tools, jargons, tips and a sneak peek into current practices adopted by professional web developers. With that being said, the kindle version has some annoying formatting issues, and I find it rather deceiving that the free sample didn't have the same issues as the full version.I am currently reading this title on my kindle for Mac on my 13 in MacBook Pro, and unlike in the free sample, the full version starts every section heading on the top left when read in a two-column view, instead of seamlessly following a section that finishes midway through the page with the next one to fill the page. This leads to pages where a very short section only displays on the left column, leaving the right column entirely blank, or sometimes such short sections are split across columns on either side, awkwardly leaving the bottom half-or-so portions on either column blank. This really gets in the way as I try to read through the book. This formatting problem is compounded by the book's plentiful use of subheadings, as even very small subheadings with only a sentence right beneath it displays on its own and takes up the entire page. I really hope they fix the formatting issue as the content of the book seems really valuable for certain cohorts of people.

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications: Learn to build and deploy robust JavaScript applications using Cucumber, Mocha, Jenkins, Docker, and Kubernetes

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