Our app now looks and feels like a real application. We went from little knowledge of Express to actually using it to build a small yet fully functional site. At this point, we now know how to respond to different HTTP methods. We know how to wire up routes in a clean and extendable manner. Our app has 14 different pieces of middleware. This might seem like a lot, but our app is also doing a lot. We can use templates and partials to render our pages easily. Finally, we have a simple authentication system that uses sessions. We laid a very good base for our chat application, all in just over 40 lines, in our app.js.

In our next chapter, we will cover how to add real-time communication between the server and the browser using Socket.io.