Enterprise Web Development

Chapter 5. Selected Productivity Tools for Enterprise Developers

The toolbox of an enterprise HTML5 developer contains tools that can improve productivity. In this chapter, we share with you some of the tools that we use.

We’ll start this chapter with a brief introduction of Node.js (or simply Node)—the server-side JavaScript framework and Node Package Manager (npm). Node and npm serve as a foundation for the tools covered in this chapter.

Next, we’ll highlight a handful of productivity tools that we use in our consulting projects, namely:

Grunt

A task-runner framework for JavaScript projects that allows you to automate repetitive operations such as running tests.

Bower

A package manager for web projects that helps in maintaining application dependencies.

Yeoman

A collection of code-generation tools and best practices.

In addition to these tools that can be used with various JavaScript frameworks, we’ll introduce you to Clear Toolkit for Ext JS, which includes the code generator Clear Data Builder—this tool was created and open-sourced by our company, Farata Systems. With Clear Toolkit, you’ll be able to quickly start a project that utilizes the Ext JS framework for frontend development and Java on the server side.

Using Node.js, V8, and npm

Node.js is a server-side JavaScript framework. Node uses V8, the JavaScript engine by Google (Chrome/Chromium also use it). Node provides the JavaScript API for accessing the filesystem, sockets, and running processes, which makes it great ...