Node: Up and Running

Let’s Build Twitter

The previous example shows how easy it is to write something extremely real-time with Node, but often you just want to write a web application. Let’s try to create something similar to Twitter with Node so we can see what it’s like to make a web application. The first thing we should do is install the Express module (Example 2-13). This web framework for Node makes it much easier to create web applications by adding support for common tasks, such as MVC, to the existing http server.

Example 2-13. Installing the Express module

Enki:~ $ npm install express
express@2.3.12 ./node_modules/express 
├── mime@1.2.2
├── connect@1.5.1
└── qs@0.1.0
Enki:~ $

Installing Express is easy using the Node Package Manager (npm). Once we have the framework installed, we can make a basic web application (Example 2-14). This looks a lot like the application we built in Chapter 1.

Note

You can read more about npm in Chapters 6 and 7.

Example 2-14. A basic web server with Express

var express = require('express')

var app = express.createServer()

app.get('/', function(req, res) {
  res.send('Welcome to Node Twitter')
})

app.listen(8000)

This code looks pretty similar to the basic web server code from Chapter 1. Instead of including the http module, however, we include express. Express is actually getting http behind the scenes, but we don’t have to get that ourselves, because Node will automatically resolve the dependencies. Like with http and net, we call createServer() to make a server and call ...