Book Image

Node Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Bethany Griggs
4 (1)
Book Image

Node Cookbook - Fourth Edition

4 (1)
By: Bethany Griggs

Overview of this book

A key technology for building web applications and tooling, Node.js brings JavaScript to the server enabling full-stack development in a common language. This fourth edition of the Node Cookbook is updated with the latest Node.js features and the evolution of the Node.js framework ecosystems. This practical guide will help you to get started with creating, debugging, and deploying your Node.js applications and cover solutions to common problems, along with tips to avoid pitfalls. You'll become familiar with the Node.js development model by learning how to handle files and build simple web applications and then explore established and emerging Node.js web frameworks such as Express.js and Fastify. As you advance, you'll discover techniques for detecting problems in your applications, handling security concerns, and deploying your applications to the cloud. This recipe-based guide will help you to easily navigate through various core topics of server-side web application development with Node.js. By the end of this Node book, you'll be well-versed with core Node.js concepts and have gained the knowledge to start building performant and scalable Node.js applications.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Building web applications with Koa.js

Koa.js, or Koa, describes itself as a next-generation web framework. In around late 2013, Koa.js was created by the same team that was originally behind Express.js. By this point, the use of Express.js was widespread, so to avoid having to make too many breaking changes to Express, new ideas were developed under Koa.js. Koa.js is a smaller and more lightweight framework compared to Express.js and does not come with any middleware preinstalled.

Originally, Koa.js was written to leverage async JavaScript and generators. However, the latest version of Koa.js (version 2) makes use of the async/await JavaScript syntax that has been natively supported in Node.js since v7.6.0.

In this recipe, we will use Koa.js v2 to create a web application.

Important Note

Koa.js exposes a Promise-based API that enables the use of the async/await JavaScript syntax. If you're unfamiliar with JavaScript Promises, it would be worthwhile reading the Promise...