Gearing up for the Journey

After learning the theory about microservices, we will now move on to hands-on implementation. This chapter will lay the foundation for the journey ahead and will revisit Node.js and TypeScript concepts essential to the book. It will tell you about the trends and adoption rates of both languages. We will go through all the required installations, and we will prepare our development environment. We will test the development environment by implementing the customary Hello World microservice. In this chapter, we will focus on the following topics:

• Setting up the primary development environment: We will set up a primary environment with all the prerequisites needed. We will understand all aspects required for microservice development.
• Primer to TypeScript: In this section, we are going to walk through some of the major TypeScript topics that we are going to use throughout the book. We will justify usage of TypeScript as our language in Node.js, and understand how applications can be written in TypeScript and Node.js.

• Primer to Node.js: In this section, we will go through some advanced Node.js topics such as clustering in Node.js, the recently introduced async/await, and others. We will understand the Event Loop, and briefly look at Node streams and latest trends in Node.js.

• Microservice implementation: We will write a Hello World microservice that will use our development environment.