Book Image

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js - Second Edition

By : Valentin Bojinov
Book Image

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js - Second Edition

By: Valentin Bojinov

Overview of this book

In this era of cloud computing, every data provisioning solution is built in a scalable and fail-safe way. Thus, when building RESTful services, the right choice for the underlying platform is vital. Node.js, with its asynchronous, event-driven architecture, is exactly the right choice to build RESTful APIs. This book will help you enrich your development skills to create scalable, server-side, RESTful applications based on the Node.js platform. Starting with the fundamentals of REST, you will understand why RESTful web services are better data provisioning solution than other technologies. You will start setting up a development environment by installing Node.js, Express.js, and other modules. Next, you will write a simple HTTP request handler and create and test Node.js modules using automated tests and mock objects. You will then have to choose the most appropriate data storage type, having options between a key/value or document data store, and also you will implement automated tests for it. This module will evolve chapter by chapter until it turns into a full-fledged and secure Restful service.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
RESTful Web API Design with Node.js - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Database modeling with Mongoose


Mongoose is a module that connects Node.js to MongoDB in an object document mapper (ODM) style. It offers the create, read, update, and delete (also known as CRUD) functionalities for documents stored in the database. Mongoose defines the structure of the used documents using schemas. The schema is the smallest unit of data definition in Mongoose. A model is built out of a schema definition. It is a constructor-like function that can be used to create or query documents.

Documents are instances of a model and represent one-to-one mapping to the documents stored in MongoDB. The schema-model-document hierarchy provides a self-descriptive way of defining objects and allows easy data validation.

Let's start with installing Mongoose with npm:

npm install mongoose

Now that we have the Mongoose module installed, our first step will be to define a schema that will represent a contact:

var mongoose = require('mongoose'); 
var contactSchema = new mongoose.Schema...