Single Page Web Applications: JavaScript end-to-end

Summary

In Single Page Web Applications you’ll learn to build modern browser-based apps that take advantage of stronger client platforms and more predictable bandwidth. You’ll learn the SPA design approach, and then start exploring new techniques like structured JavaScript and responsive design. And you’ll learn how to capitalize on trends like server-side JavaScript and NoSQL data stores, as well as new frameworks that make JavaScript more manageable and testable as a first-class language.

About this Book

If your website is a jumpy collection of linked pages, you are behind. Single page web applications are your next step: pushing UI rendering and business logic to the browser and communicating with the server only to synchronize data, they provide a smooth user experience, much like a native application. But, SPAs can be hard to develop, manage, and test.

Single Page Web Applications shows how your team can easily design, test, maintain, and extend sophisticated SPAs using JavaScript end-to-end, without getting locked into a framework. Along the way, you’ll develop advanced HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript skills, and use JavaScript as the language of the web server and the database.

This book assumes basic knowledge of web development. No experience with SPAs is required.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

What’s Inside

• Design, build, and test a full-stack SPA
• Best-in-class tools like jQuery, TaffyDB, Node.js, and MongoDB
• Real-time web with web sockets and Socket.IO
• Touch controls for tablets and smartphones
• Common SPA design mistakes

About the Authors

The authors are architects and engineering managers. Michael Mikowski has worked on many commercial SPAs and a platform that processes over 100 billion requests per year. Josh Powell has built some of the most heavily trafficked sites on the web.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Introducing SPAs
Chapter 1. Our first single page application
Chapter 2. Reintroducing JavaScript

Part 2: The SPA client
Chapter 3. Develop the Shell
Chapter 4. Add feature modules
Chapter 5. Build the Model
Chapter 6. Finish the Model and Data modules

Part 3: The SPA server
Chapter 7. The web server
Chapter 8. The server database
Chapter 9. Readying our SPA for production

Appendix A. JavaScript coding standard
Appendix B. Testing an SPA