Modern JavaScript Development
Node
Prerequisite for all modern JavaScript development is local instance of node JavaScript runtime.
NPM
npm is package manager for java script modules. It is used together
with nodejs environment (virtual machine).
When starting a new java script project you would definetly want to start with empty folder and first thing to type into terminal is:
npm init
Than answer on the screen questions and you have just created your package.json file - that is roughly pom.xml for npm.
package.json file
Package json file has only two required fields: name and version.
name
- all lowercase
- one word, no spaces
- dashes and underscores allowed
version
- in the form of x.x.x
- follows semver spec
So here it is - smallest valid package.json file:
{
"name": "my-app-name",
"version": "1.0.0"
}
Please note that version field requires semantic version number.
installing dependencies
Dependencies can be installed globaly or localy
TypeScript
TypeScript is superset of JavaScript. It is in essence modern JS language with types. Also one usefull thing regarding typescript is that it makes gap between latest EcmaScript specification and actual implementation of javascript in browsers.
tsconfig.json
Presence of tsconfig.json file indicates that the folder is the root of typescript project.
Typings
Since typescript is strict and statically typed language, if we want to
integrate with plain javascript libraries - we need to declare types used in sad libraries. This is the sole reason for typings tool to exist. To search and download ambient type definitions of external libraries.
More information about ambient type definitions can be found here:
webpack module bundler
WebPack is a module bundler. It is a tool that will take your entry java script file and bundle it up together with all its dependencies in order to create single js file that can be used in browser or node environments.