At this month's meetup Duncan gave a workshop about Node and Grunt, which touched on many techniques in JavaScript development along the way (e.g. Modularisation, Package Management, JSHint, Testing).

Some facts about Node I didn't know: It has the V8 engine integrated, you can use it to create web and desktop applications, and dependencies in Node are managed with the CommonJs library.

I found interesting to learn about dependency management in Node. Each module has its own submodules. Even if there are common dependencies, they will be downloaded for each module separately. You might even get different versions. This way conflicts are avoided, also the files are ususally not very big.

The workshop can be found on our GitHub account: https://github.com/CodeHubOrg/node-grunt-workshop

A summary from the Readme file:

By the end of this workshop you will be able to:

• Create a nodejs http server
• Use the same javascript on client and server
• Use package managers to handle all your external libraries
• Use CommonJS to structure your javascript
• Use JSHint to catch common javascript errors
• Use Jasmine and Karma to unit test your code
• Use Grunt to automate your build

We did not manage to completely work through the whole workshop, and decided to finish it at home. Duncan offered to answer any questions we might have at the next meetup.

Also at the next meetup, Rob will talk about animation with CSS3, HTML5 Canvas and three.js.

By Katja
Posted in Categories: javascript grunt node express