Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Single Page Application Development

Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Single Page Application Development

Overview of this book

Single-page web applications—or SPAs, as they are commonly referred to—are quickly becoming the de facto standard for web app development. The fact that a major part of the app runs inside a single web page makes it very interesting and appealing. Also, the accelerated growth of browser capabilities is pushing us closer to the day when all apps will run entirely in the browser. This book will take your JavaScript development skills to the next level by teaching you to create a single-page application within a full-stack JavaScript environment. Using only JavaScript, you can go from being a front-end developer to a full-stack application developer with relative ease. You will learn to cross the boundary from front-end development to server-side development through the use of JavaScript on both ends. Use your existing knowledge of JavaScript by learning to manage a JSON document data store with MongoDB, writing a JavaScript powered REST API with Node.js and Express, and designing a front-end powered by AngularJS. This book will teach you to leverage the MEAN stack to do everything from document database design, routing REST web API requests, data-binding within views, and adding authentication and security to building a full-fledged, complex, single-page web application. In addition to building a full-stack JavaScript app, you will learn to test it with JavaScript-powered testing tools such as Mocha, Karma, and Jasmine. Finally, you will learn about deployment and scaling so that you can launch your own apps into the real world.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering JavaScript Single Page Application Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Organized with NPM, Bower, and Grunt
13
Testing with Mocha, Karma, and More

Examining Express in detail


Express represents a very thin layer on top of Node's HTTP server, but it has a few built-in objects that are important to become familiar with. These include the App, Request, Response, and Router objects. These objects, and a couple of plugins, provide all of the core functionality of the Express framework.

App object

In Express, the app object typically refers to the Express application. This is by convention and is the result of calling the express() function. Open up your app.js file and see the line that reads varapp=express(). This is where we create our application and assign it to the variable app. We could have used any variable name, but the convention is to use app. We'll stick to convention and refer to this object as app.

Let's take a closer look at our app.js file and look at how we're already using the app object:

var express = require('express'); 
var path = require('path'); 
var favicon = require('serve-favicon'); 
var logger = require...