Building Web Applications with Express

Express is the most popular web framework for JavaScript and has been the de-facto standard for many years. It is a very minimalistic framework, very easy to learn, and provides a lot of flexibility to build web applications.

In this chapter, we will start with the most basic “hello world” application to build a solid and well-tested REST API application. We will explore in detail all the critical components of Express, including request and response, middleware, and routing. We will also learn how to use the most common Express middleware and how to build our own middleware.

To sum up, here are the main topics that we will explore in this chapter:

• Serving static files for your project
• Building a server-rendered landing page using template engines
• Building a typical CRUD REST API application with Express
• Using the most common Express middleware, including third-party libraries
• Building your own middleware...