Chapter 1. Backend Development with Express

This chapter will show how to set up Express for our application. Express is the application framework for Node.js. If Node.js is the foundation, Express will be the framework of our house. Express provides us with routing, sessions, form processing, and so on. Entire books have been written on it, so we will just touch on what we require. If you have never used Express before in a Node project, don't worry, you will get a good feel of it by the end of this chapter. If you were lucky enough to use Express before, then hopefully I can show you something you don't already know.

The topics that we will cover in this chapter are as follows:

• Serving and responding to HTTP requests
• Routing
• Middleware
• Templating
• Creating sessions
• Parsing form data
• Integrating everything together