APIs are at the core of every serious web application. Node.js is an especially exciting tool that is easy to use, allows you to build APIs, and develop your backend code in JavaScript. It powers the server side of web apps, including PayPal, Netflix, and Zenhub.
Express.js is the most popular framework that can be used to build on top of Node.js—it provides an essential level of abstraction to develop robust web applications. With the emergence of this minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework, creating Node.js applications has become much simpler, faster, and also requires minimal effort.
This book takes a pragmatic approach to leveraging what Express.js has to offer, introduces key libraries, and fully equips you with the skills and tools necessary to build scalable APIs from start to finish while offering subtle details and nuggets of wisdom that come from years of experience.
Chapter 1, Building a Basic Express Site, will provide a basic application (scaffolding), which we will use for the upcoming examples. You will get an insight into what Express applications look like.
Chapter 2, A Robust Movie API, will walk you through building a movie API that allows you to add actor and movie information to a database and connect actors to movies and vice versa.
Chapter 3, Multiplayer Game API – Connect 4, will revolve around building a multiplayer game API. We will also build the app using test-driven development with maximum code coverage.
Chapter 4, MMO Word Game, will teach you how to build a real-time application with Express and SocketIO, perform authentication for socket handshaking, and deal with race conditions using MongoDB's atomic update.
Chapter 5, Coffee with Strangers, will enable you to write an API that allows users to go for a coffee! It will comprise a simple, yet extendable user-matching system.
Chapter 6, Hacker News API on Koa.js, will take you through building a CRUD backend to post links and upvote on Koa.js. We will also look at centralized error handling and avoid callback hell with thunks.
Appendix, Connect 4 – Game Logic, shows the accompanying game logic that we omitted in Chapter 3, Multiplayer Game API – Connect 4.
You'll need the following to get started with the examples in this book:
MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.org/downloads
RoboMongo: http://robomongo.org/
Mocha: Use the
npm i -g mochacommand to download it
Mac OS is preferred but not a necessity.
This book is for beginners to Node.js and also for those who are technically advanced. By the end of this book, every developer will have the expertise to build web applications with Express.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles 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: "If it is, then we render the users/profile.jade template with req.user as the data."
A block of code is set as follows:
var express = require('express');
var app = express();
app.get('/', function(req, res, next) {
res.send('Hello, World!');
});
app.listen(3000);
console.log('Express started on port 3000');Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ npm install --save express
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You can also right click on the page, and select Inspect Element."
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