Book Image

Express Web Application Development

By : Hage Yaaapa
Book Image

Express Web Application Development

By: Hage Yaaapa

Overview of this book

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications. It provides a thin layer of features fundamental to any web application, without obscuring features that developers know and love in node.js. "Express Web Application Development" is a comprehensive guide for those looking to learn how to use the Express web framework for web application development. Starting with the initial setup of the Express web framework, "Express Web Application Development" helps you to understand the fundamentals of the framework. By the end of "Express Web Application Development", you will have acquired enough knowledge and skills to create production-ready Express apps. All of this is made possible by the incremental introduction of more advanced topics, starting from the very essentials. On the way to mastering Express for application development, we teach you the more advanced topics such as routes, views, middleware, forms, sessions, cookies and various other aspects of configuring an Express application. Jade; the recommended HTML template engine, and Stylus; the CSS pre-processor for Express, are covered in detail. Last, but definitely not least, Express Web Application Development also covers practices and setups that are required to make Express apps production-ready.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Express Web Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

What is Jade?


Jade, the templating language has a very intuitive syntax. You will most likely understand 70 percent of how Jade works just by looking at an example. In fact, the best way to start learning Jade is to look at a moderately complex Jade example and try to make sense of it.

Note

In this chapter, we will be focusing only on the language aspect of Jade. For other details about Jade, visit the official Jade website at http://jade-lang.com/.

Jade support is not enabled in Express apps by default. Jade is one of the many template engines supported by Express. We will need to configure our app to support Jade by setting two app variables: one for setting the view engine to jade, and the other to set the views directory, where the view files for the app will be located:

app.set('view engine', 'jade');
app.set('views','./views');

Let's set up a quick app to see an example of Jade code in action.

The following is the content for app.js. Note that we have specified that a view named index should...