Express is the most common and flexible framework to build web applications on Node. It provides us with a robust set of features to deal with such as SPA, the RESTful API, and of course, the MEAN stack. The Express framework has full support for templates and rendering using the Jade engine as the default. It is very suitable for large-scale applications that render HTML on the server side.

Of course, we have others options such as the amazing restify microframework, strictly built to deal with the RESTful API, but as we are talking about MEAN, we use only the acronym-related technology, which is Express.

Jade is a template engine uniquely for Node, inspired by Ruby and Haml with rule-based indentation, like the Sass and Python syntax. More information on Jade can be found at http://jade-lang.com/.

The main reason to use Express is that the default Node API is not as robust for complex applications, as every route management and other features are treated...