Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fourth Edition

By : David Herron
Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fourth Edition

By: David Herron

Overview of this book

Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform using an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model allowing users to build fast and scalable data-intensive applications running in real time. This book gives you an excellent starting point, bringing you straight to the heart of developing web applications with Node.js. You will progress from a rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript and server-side development to being able to create, maintain, deploy and test your own Node.js application.You will understand the importance of transitioning to functions that return Promise objects, and the difference between fs, fs/promises and fs-extra. With this book you'll learn how to use the HTTP Server and Client objects, data storage with both SQL and MongoDB databases, real-time applications with Socket.IO, mobile-first theming with Bootstrap, microservice deployment with Docker, authenticating against third-party services using OAuth, and use some well known tools to beef up security of Express 4.16 applications.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Getting started with Express


Express is perhaps the most popular Node.js web app framework. It's so popular that it's part of the MEAN Stack acronym. MEAN refers to MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and Node.js. Express is described as being Sinatra-like, referring to a popular Ruby application framework, and that it isn't an opinionated framework, meaning the framework authors don't impose their opinions about structuring an application. This meansExpressis not at all strict about how your code is structured; you just write it the way you think is best.

You can visit the home page for Express at http://expressjs.com/.

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

As of writing this book, Express 4.16 is the current version, and Express 5 is in Alpha testing. According to...