Mastering JavaScript Single Page Application Development

An in-depth guide to exploring the design, architecture, and techniques behind building sophisticated, scalable, and maintainable single-page applications in JavaScript

About This Book

• Build large-scale, feature-complete SPAs by leveraging widely used tools and techniques.
• Gain a solid understanding of architecture and SPA design to build applications using the library or framework of your choice.
• Explore the various facets of SPA development to build web apps that are fast, scalable, and easy to test.

Who This Book Is For

This book is ideal for JavaScript developers who want to build complex single-page applications in JavaScript. Some basic understanding of SPA concepts will be helpful but not essential.

What You Will Learn

• Organize your development environment using the command line with NPM, Bower, and Grunt.
• Choose an accurate design pattern for your app
• Understand modular JavaScript programming and Node.js
• Interact with a REST API using JavaScript and AJAX with practical examples
• Build a single page application using the MEAN stack
• Connect your app across popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
• Test your app, both on the server side and in views
• Prepare your app for the real world and deploy it to Heroku

In Detail

Single-page web applications—or SPAs, as they are commonly referred to—are quickly becoming the de facto standard for web app development. The fact that a major part of the app runs inside a single web page makes it very interesting and appealing. Also, the accelerated growth of browser capabilities is pushing us closer to the day when all apps will run entirely in the browser.

This book will take your JavaScript development skills to the next level by teaching you to create a single-page application within a full-stack JavaScript environment. Using only JavaScript, you can go from being a front-end developer to a full-stack application developer with relative ease.

You will learn to cross the boundary from front-end development to server-side development through the use of JavaScript on both ends. Use your existing knowledge of JavaScript by learning to manage a JSON document data store with MongoDB, writing a JavaScript powered REST API with Node.js and Express, and designing a front-end powered by AngularJS.

This book will teach you to leverage the MEAN stack to do everything from document database design, routing REST web API requests, data-binding within views, and adding authentication and security to building a full-fledged, complex, single-page web application.

In addition to building a full-stack JavaScript app, you will learn to test it with JavaScript-powered testing tools such as Mocha, Karma, and Jasmine. Finally, you will learn about deployment and scaling so that you can launch your own apps into the real world.

Style and approach

Following a structured approach, this book helps readers gain expertise in SPA development. Its thorough coverage of SPA architecture and design, along with practical use cases, provides readers with a clear path to building applications with the library of their choice. For readers who are afraid to take the plunge straightaway, the book also offers step-by-step guidance on developing a complex web app.