Building a RESTful server

As mentioned in Chapter 1, JavaScript and the Web, JavaScript is used in the server side as well. In this example, we'll use Node.js and Express.js to build a simple RESTful server before we touch upon how we can secure our RESTful APIs.

Note

For the remainder of this book, you will require Node.js Version 0.10.2x or above, MongoDB Version 2.2 or above, and Express.js 4.x. To install them, feel free to refer to their respective installation instructions. For Node.js, refer to http://nodejs.org/, MongoDB at http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/, and Express.js at http://expressjs.com/. To keep things simple, all modules installed will be installed globally.

A simple RESTful server in Node.js and Express.js

We'll build a RESTful server using Node.js and Express.js 4.x. This RESTful server contains a few endpoints:

• /api/todos:
  • GET: This endpoint gets a full list of to-do items
  • POST: This creates a new to-do item
• /api/todos/:id:
  • POST: This deletes a to-do...