Web Development with Node and Express

Chapter 3. Saving Time with Express

In Chapter 2, you learned how to create a simple web server using only Node. In this chapter, we will recreate that server using Express. This will provide a jumping-off point for the rest of the content of this book and introduce you to the basics of Express.

Scaffolding

Scaffolding is not a new idea, but many people (myself included) were introduced to the concept by Ruby. The idea is simple: most projects require a certain amount of so-called “boilerplate” code, and who wants to recreate that code every time you begin a new project? A simple way is to create a rough skeleton of a project, and every time you need a new project, you just copy this skeleton, or template.

Ruby on Rails took this concept one step further by providing a program that would automatically generate scaffolding for you. The advantage of this approach is that it could generate a more sophisticated framework than just selecting from a collection of templates.

Express has taken a page from Ruby on Rails and provided a utility to generate scaffolding to start your Express project.

While the Express scaffolding utility is useful, it currently doesn’t generate the framework I will be recommending in this book. In particular, it doesn’t provide support for my templating language of choice (Handlebars), and it also doesn’t follow some of the naming conventions I prefer (though that is easy enough to fix).

While we won’t be using the scaffolding utility, I encourage you to take a ...