Join me on a journey to learn React… Who is this for I’ve been a web developer for more than fifteen years. …

Introduction — There are many excellent in-depth tutorials that explain the advantages of using promises vs. callbacks (a few are listed at the end of this article) — this isn’t one of them, this is just a very quick guide to converting callback-based code to promises. You’ll need to read (and ideally…

Introduction — This article illustrates how to resolve some of the most common security threats to Node.js web applications as identified by this OWASP article: https://speakerdeck.com/ckarande/top-overlooked-security-threats-to-node-dot-js-web-applications Many of these issues can be addressed by using the Helmet middleware library (https://www.npmjs.com/package/helmet), so code examples are provided for “standard” Express applications, and for applications…

Introduction — The use of modules in Node is central to its popularity as a development platform as it allows software building blocks to be wired together quickly and easily. But as with most things in the Node world, there are several different ways that modules can be created and then used… The Basics …

Introduction — There are any number of different ways to structure the routing in a Node / Express application, as illustrated in this selection of posts: http://zihua.li/2014/05/good-practices-to-structure-an-express-app/ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/HSAnPvADHq0 (second post) http://scottksmith.com/blog/2014/05/02/building-restful-apis-with-node/ http://www.terlici.com/2014/08/25/best-practices-express-structure.html

Introduction — There are a number of popular JavaScript testing frameworks available — Jasmine, Mocha, Jest, NodeUnit, and many more. Many of these provide a wealth of functionality and aim to provide a complete testing solution. In most cases these make a separation between the Test Runner (the thing that runs tests…

Introduction Templating frameworks separate the layout of dynamic web sites and applications from the logic that integrates with it. All frameworks support various forms of looping, conditional logic and special formatting. But I also wanted an engine that supported advanced page composition elements, to enable me to share layouts across pages…

Introduction Gulp is a “JavaScript task runner” — like its main competitor Grunt, it’s a development tool that can be used to automate things like minification, concatenation, unit testing, linting (i.e. identifying code errors — see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lint_%28software%29 for more information) and template pre-rendering. Whereas Grunt is configuration-based, Gulp is code-based, and…