Building an Express application that is reliable, robust, maintainable, testable, and can scale beyond a single server requires a bit of extra thought and effort. Express applications that need to survive in a production environment will need to reach out to the Node ecosystem and beyond for support. Advanced Express Web Application Development aims to deliver a working real-world, single-page application that can meet these goals and allow us the opportunity to explore the more advanced features of Express.
Chapter 1, Foundations, lays the foundation as we put in place a skeleton application; we introduce testing and automation practices that we will use to build our example single-page application.
Chapter 2, Building a Web API, helps in building a web API that our application will consume.
Chapter 3, Templating, helps you create a consuming client with a working web API in place and explore the client- and server-side templating.
Chapter 4, Real-time Communication, helps us to add real-time updates to content displayed in our single-page application.
Chapter 5, Security, guides us to secure our application as we look at authentication, security vulnerabilities, and SSL.
Chapter 6, Scaling, demonstrates scaling our Express application using Redis, and also looks at the benefits of decoupling an Express application.
Chapter 7, Production, examines real-world Express deployment issues such as performance, robustness, and reliability.
In order to create and run the examples in this book, you will need a Mac or PC running Windows or Linux; you can use any text editor. This book will provide you with instructions on installing Node.js, Express, and various dependencies including Redis and MongoDB.
If you are an experienced JavaScript developer who wants to build highly scalable, real-world applications using Express, this book is ideal for you. This book is an advanced title and assumes that the reader has some experience with Node.js, JavaScript MVC web development frameworks, and has at least heard of Express before. The reader should also have a basic understanding of Redis and MongoDB. This book is not a tutorial on node but aims to explore some of the more advanced topics you will encounter when developing, deploying, and maintaining an Express web application.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Let's extract our route heartbeat into ./lib/routes/heartbeat.js; the following listing simply exports the route as a function called index:"
A block of code is set as follows:
exports.index = function(req, res){
res.json(200, 'OK');
};Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
npm install -g express NODE_ENV=COVERAGE mocha -R html-cov > coverage.html
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In order to acquire a GitHub token, log in to your GitHub account and go to the Accounts section of your Settings page, you will need to enter your password. Now click on Create new token, name the token if you prefer. Click on the copy to clipboard button in order to copy the token into the following login."
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