Express is a web application framework built upon Connect (a middleware framework). This means that the focus of Express is on constructing an application that includes providing a template system, whereas the focus of Connect is on web server infrastructural support.

The home page for Connect is http://senchalabs.github.com/connect/.

The home page for Express is http://expressjs.com/.

Shortly, we'll be implementing a simple application to calculate Fibonacci numbers using Express, and in later chapters we'll be doing quite a bit more with Express. We'll also be exploring how to mitigate the performance problems from the computationally intensive code we discussed earlier.

Before we start implementing the Fibonacci application, we must set up and familiarize ourselves with Express.

Install Express globally in order to have access to the Express command-line tool.

$ sudo npm install -g express
.. much output
/opt/local/bin/express -> /opt/local/lib/node_modules...