In this final chapter, we gave an overview of node.js and Express. Thanks to node.js, you can use JavaScript across the board, on both the client and server side. You can even write your own web server with just a few lines of code. As you only include the things you really need, you can obtain far better performance with this avant-garde way of doing web development.

As you combine the web server and the server application in your code, there may be more code to write than you wish for. That is where Express comes to the rescue: a lightweight framework that results in more compact, yet robust code.

To conclude, we touched on the tip of the templating iceberg by introducing handlebars.js. This is a better way to separate layout from dynamic content and have the framework combine the two, so the browser can render it as a view. For that purpose, we concluded the chapter by writing a layout in HTML.

This reminds me of Anna Russell's rendition of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, which...