Chapter 1. Foundations

Advanced Express Web Application Development will guide you through the process of building a nontrivial, single-page application using Express.

Express is a fast, unopinionated, minimalist, and flexible web application framework for Node.js written by TJ. Holowaychuk. It was inspired by Sinatra , a web framework for Ruby. Express provides a robust set of features for building single, multi-page, and hybrid web applications and has quickly become the most popular web development framework for node. Express is built on top of an extensible HTTP server framework—also developed by TJ. Holowaychuk—called Connect. Connect provides a set of high performance plugins known as middleware. Connect includes over 20 commonly used middleware, including a logger, session support, cookie parser, and more.

This book will guide you through the process of building a single-page application called Vision; a dashboard for software development projects that integrates with GitHub to give you a single-screen snapshot of your software development projects issues and commits. This project will allow us to demonstrate the advanced features Express has to offer and will give us the opportunity to explore the kind of issues encountered in a commercial development and production deployment of a node/Express application.