The remainder of this book is going to be a guided tour that walks you through creating a complete data-driven website. The website we create will feature almost every aspect of a typical large-scale web development project. The app will be developed using a popular Node.js framework called Express, and it will persist data using MongoDB. In the first few chapters, we will cover the groundwork involved in getting the core of the server up and serving content. This includes configuring your environment so you are up and running with Node and MongoDB, and a basic introduction to the core concepts of both technologies. Then, we will write a web server from scratch powered by ExpressJS, which will handle serving all of the necessary files for the website. From there, we will work with the Handlebars template engine to serve both static and dynamic HTML web pages. Diving deeper, we will make the application persistent by adding a data layer where the records for the website will be saved and retrieved via a MongoDB server.

We will cover writing a RESTful API so that other people can interact with your application. Finally, we will go into the details to see how to write and execute tests for all of your code. A summary is given in the following figure:

Wrapping up, we will take a brief detour as we examine some popular, merging frontend technologies that are becoming increasingly popular while writing SPAs. These technologies include Backbone.js, Angular, and Ember.js.

Last but not least, we will go into details about how to deploy your new website to the Internet using popular cloud-based hosting services such as Heroku and Amazon Web Services.