Using an application framework

The server we created in the REPL used the low-level HTTP module built into Node.js. This provides an API for creating a server that reads data from requests and writes to responses.

As with other programming platforms, there are frameworks available providing more useful high-level abstractions for writing web applications. These include things such as URL routing and templating engines. ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, and Spring MVC are all examples of such frameworks on different platforms.

Note

Example code

If you get stuck at any point in this book, you can follow along with the code at https://github.com/NodeJsForDevelopers (there is a repository for each chapter and a commit for each heading that introduces any new code).

In this book, we'll be using a framework called Express to write a web application in Node.js. Express is the most popular web application framework for Node.js. It is well suited to small-scale applications such as the one we'll...