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

Introduction


Stylus is a CSS preprocessor—a tool for generating CSS in a more efficient and dynamic manner. It comes with a logical syntax for generating CSS style definition blocks, and a programming language to make the CSS generation process very dynamic.

Note

Although, we cover most aspects of Stylus in this chapter, for a complete coverage of the topic visit the official website at http://learnboost.github.io/stylus/.

Stylus files have a .styl file extension. The contents of these files are parsed and converted to CSS code when the corresponding .css file is requested by a user agent.

Stylus CSS syntax isn't very different from regular CSS. In fact, regular CSS language is valid Stylus too, because Stylus is a superset of CSS. All Stylus does is add some dynamic capabilities to the plain old CSS. However, colons, semicolons, commas, and braces are optional in Stylus.

A very important difference between CSS and Stylus is that whitespace is significant in Stylus. In fact, we use indentation...