Many Node.js developers will be tempted to adopt web frameworks such as Express in order to achieve routing and templating for their applications but, as we stated in the introduction, that would be not recommended as it's the client-server way to approach the problem. Let's see how to achieve the same result the NW.js way.

If you think about it, most of the recent web application frameworks provide client-based routing. When you click on a link, the page won't reload; instead, the new view will be rendered in real time and the URL of the page will change accordingly thanks to the HTML5 History API. This way, a minimal amount of data will be exchanged between the server and the client, and you won't feel the bad experience of the full page reloading.

So, you can obviously rely on a web application framework, such as AngularJS or Ember.js, to do all of your routing, but you can also write a very simple view loader yourself as, in a desktop application, you won...