JavaScript Tooling
A book of the overlooked bits in JavaScript tooling system
This is an online book made of articles about popular tools being used heavily in modern web applications, constantly updated to reflect rapid development of JavaScript, and has ambition to cover every corners from frontend to backend toolchain.
There is no right or wrong silver bullet solution. The combination of tools you use can be completely up to you depending on how much effort you can put into configuring and setting up. You can achieve the same results with different tools and settings.
Getting Started
Let’s dive into the pool of tools built around JavaScript over the years, glimpse at the concepts behind these tools, and review some popular options in each category.
Related Concepts
Following concepts play important roles in shaping the whole tooling system, what a tool wants to achieve, what JavaScript features a tool relies on, and in what environments a tool operates.
- Type safety in JavaScript
- On adoption of monorepo
- JavaScript module formats
- Javascript host environments
- Tree shaking in JavaScript
Tool categories
These tools could have started in one category and then expanding into multiple categories, the boundary is sometimes very blurred. Emerging technologies approach the problem from different angles, sometimes they build on top of other tools, and at times they can be used together.
- Static type checkers
- JavaScript code linters
- JavaScript package managers
- JavaScript module loaders
- JavaScript module bundlers
- JavaScript task runners
- JavaScript transpilers
- JavaScript build tools
- JavaScript debuggers
- JavaScript monorepo tools
- Node process managers
- Scaffolding tools
- Static site generators
Best practices
It’s best for beginners to use starter projects with recommended configurations especially in production builds. Configuring a production ready build system requires a steep learning curve, very time consuming, and best suited for experienced developers.