Accelerating Server-Side Development with Fastify: A comprehensive guide to API development for building a scalable backend for your web apps

Key Features

• Written by Fastify's core contributors to help you adopt the Fastify mindset for API development
• Gain an architectural overview of Fastify’s microservices development capabilities and features
• Build complete apps in Fastify, from application design to production

Book Description

This book is a complete guide to server-side app development in Fastify, written by the core contributors of this highly performant plugin-based web framework. Throughout the book, you’ll discover how it fosters code reuse, thereby improving your time to market.

Starting with an introduction to Fastify’s fundamental concepts, this guide will lead you through the development of a real-world project while providing in-depth explanations of advanced topics to prepare you to build highly maintainable and scalable backend applications. The book offers comprehensive guidance on how to design, develop, and deploy RESTful applications, including detailed instructions for building reusable components that can be leveraged across multiple projects. The book presents guidelines for creating efficient, reliable, and easy-to-maintain real-world applications. It also offers practical advice on best practices, design patterns, and how to avoid common pitfalls encountered by developers while building backend applications.

By following these guidelines and recommendations, you’ll be able to confidently design, implement, deploy, and maintain an application written in Fastify, and develop plugins and APIs to contribute to the Fastify and open source communities.

What you will learn

• Explore the encapsulation techniques implemented by Fastify
• Understand how to deploy, monitor, and handle errors in a running Fastify instance
• Organize the project structure and implement a microservices architecture
• Explore Fastify’s core features such as code reuse, runtime speed, and much more
• Discover best practices for implementing Fastify in real-world RESTful apps
• Understand advanced backend development concepts such as performance monitoring and logging

Who this book is for

This book is for mid to expert-level backend web developers who have already used other backend web frameworks and are familiar with HTTP protocol and its peculiarities. Developers looking to migrate to Fastify, evaluate its suitability for their next project, avoid architecture pitfalls, and build highly responsive and maintainable API servers will also find this book useful. The book assumes knowledge of JavaScript programming, Node.js, and backend development.

Table of Contents

1. What is Fastify?
2. The Plugin System and the Boot Process
3. Working with Routes
4. Exploring Hooks
5. Exploring Validation and Serialization
6. Project Structure and Configuration Management
7. Building a RESTful API
8. Authentication, Authorization, and File Handling
9. Application Testing
10. Deployment and Process monitoring for a healthy application
11. Meaningful Application logging
12. From a Monolith to Microservices
13. Performance Assessment and Improvement
14. Developing a GraphQL API
15. Type-Safe Fastify

Manuel Spigolon is a Senior Backend Developer at Near Form. He is one of core maintainers on the Fastiy team. Manuel has developed and maintained a complex API that serves more than 10 millions world wide.

Maksim Sinik is a senior engineering manager and a core maintainer of the Fastify framework. He has a decade of experience as a Node.js developer with a strong interest in backend scalability. He designed the architecture and led the development of several service-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms across multiple industries that process hundreds of thousands of requests.

Matteo Collina is the co-founder and CTO of Platformatic who has the goal of removing all friction from backend development. He is also a prolific open source author in the JavaScript ecosystem, and the modules he maintains are downloaded more than 17 billion times a year. Previously, he was the chief software architect at NearForm, the best professional services company in the JavaScript ecosystem. In 2014, he defended his Ph.D. thesis titled Application Platforms for the Internet of Things. Matteo is a member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee, focusing on streams, diagnostics, and HTTP. He is also the author of the fast logger, Pino, and the Fastify web framework. Matteo is a renowned international speaker after more than 60 conferences, including OpenJS World, Node.js Interactive, NodeConf.eu, NodeSummit, JSConf.Asia, WebRebels, and JsDay, to name just a few. Since August 2023, he also serves as a community director on the OpenJS Foundation. In the summer, he loves sailing the Sirocco.