Zero to Production Node.js on Amazon Web Services The Sample Application

Transcript from the "The Sample Application" Lesson

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>> [MUSIC]

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>> Kevin Whinnery: But again, the goal is to get a 10,000 foot view of what a production node code base could look like and some of the tools that you're gonna need. So in order to do that, I did put together a sample application that is based on a sample application that you've seen probably 100 times before, which is TodoMVC.

[00:00:24] I called it TodoMVC++. Thank you, I'll show myself out. But what the application does is not the important bit. Basically what this thing is going to do is present a rich front end that shows a To Do list that you can edit. Most of the time this TodoMVC application just lives on the client side and persists stuff to local storage.

[00:00:49] We've extended it to actually store those todo list items in a database which is driven by an express based API layer. So the what of the application is not so not as important as the how, so that's what we're going to be focusing most of our time on.

[00:01:09] So that's why I went with a sample application that we already understand. So that we can focus on the layout of the project, and how we go about our business of building the project. We will dive into a few specific details, especially tomorrow when we talk about ViewJS and how ViewJS handles rich front end development tasks, things like that.

[00:01:30] But we probably won't go too deep into any one tool. Again, the focus is on that 10,000 foot view. It'll mirror the techniques that you might really use in your NodeJS application, I'm sure you'll riff on what we put forward. It also doesn't do everything that you might do in production.

[00:01:48] Just at some point you have to draw the line in a learning experience like this one, so there's stuff that you're gonna wanna do in production that you won't see in here. So we're not going to do the DNS configuration to route a domain to our elastic load balancer instance.

[00:02:05] We don't implement cache busting file names based on the hashes of CSS and JavaScript content. So there's definitely areas in which we can go further in our road to production. But this is kind of a baseline that you can use to build out those other things as well.

[00:02:24] It's going to do most of the big things the way that you're probably gonna want to approach it. The code is structured using the Google JavaScript style guide. I don't know if it's the best one, but it's the one I use, and as long as you have a style guide I feel like that's pretty good.

[00:02:41] And it also combines a set of technologies that I use personally, and have used for a long time. And again, there might be some that you prefer over another. Maybe you think Happy is better than Express, and maybe that's true but this is a set of technologies that work together pretty well.

[00:02:59] And I invite you to riff on that as we go through.