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You're reading from  Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

Product typeBook
Published inSep 2018
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781788477321
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Daniel Li
Daniel Li
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Daniel Li

Daniel Li is a full-stack JavaScript developer at Nexmo. Previously, he was also the Managing Director of Brew, a digital agency in Hong Kong that specializes in MeteorJS. A proponent of knowledge-sharing and open source, Daniel has written over 100 blog posts and in-depth tutorials, helping hundreds of thousands of readers navigate the world of JavaScript and the web.
Read more about Daniel Li

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Transpiling ES6 with Babel


We've been using the CommonJS require syntax for modules; let's change it to use the ES6 module syntax (using import).

In your code, update the first line to use import:

const http = require('http'); // CommonJS syntax
import http from 'http'; // ES6 syntax

When we try to run our server by executing node index.js, it will throw a SyntaxError: Unexpected token import error. This is because Node.js support for modules is still experimental, and not likely to be supported without the --experimental-modules flag until late 2018.

This means that for us to write our source code using ES6 modules, we need to add an extra step that will transpile the unsupported syntax into supported syntax. There are a few compilers/transpilers available for us to choose from:

  • Babel: The most popular and de facto standard for JavaScript compilers/transpilers.
  • Traceur: Another compiler by Google.
  • The TypeScript compiler: TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that provides static typing. Since...
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You have been reading a chapter from
Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications
Published in: Sep 2018Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781788477321

Author (1)

author image
Daniel Li

Daniel Li is a full-stack JavaScript developer at Nexmo. Previously, he was also the Managing Director of Brew, a digital agency in Hong Kong that specializes in MeteorJS. A proponent of knowledge-sharing and open source, Daniel has written over 100 blog posts and in-depth tutorials, helping hundreds of thousands of readers navigate the world of JavaScript and the web.
Read more about Daniel Li