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

Using sessions to store data


While we can use cookies for storing information relevant to a user, it starts to become unwieldy as their number increases and the size of the data grows. That's where sessions come in.

Sessions, however, should not be mistaken for an independent replacement for cookies. In fact, the sessions API leverages a cookie to identify a user's session.

There are two broad ways of implementing sessions in Express: using cookies and using a session store at the backend. Both of them add a new object in the request object named session, which contains the session variables.

No matter which method you use, Express provides a consistent interface for interacting with the session data.

Cookie-based sessions

Using the fact that cookies can store data in the user's browser, a session API can be implemented using cookies. Express comes with a built-in middleware called cookieSession that does just that.

Load the cookieParser middleware with a secret, followed by the cookieSession...