Chapter 6. Connect and Express in depth
This chapter covers
- Understanding what Connect and Express are for
- Using and creating middleware
- Creating and configuring an Express application
- Using key Express techniques for error handling, rendering views, and forms
- Using Express architectural techniques for routes, REST APIs, and authentication
In chapter 3, you saw how to build a simple Express application. This chapter provides a more in-depth study of Express and Connect. These two popular Node modules are used by many web developers. This chapter shows you how to build web apps and REST APIs with the most commonly used patterns.
Connect and Express
The concepts discussed in the following section are directly applicable to the higher-level framework Express because it extends and builds upon Connect with additional higher-level sugar. After reading this section, you’ll have a firm understanding of how Connect middleware works and how to compose components together to create an application. Other Node web frameworks work in a similar way, so learning Connect will give you a head start when learning new frameworks.
To start, let’s see how to create a basic Connect application. Later in the chapter, you’ll see how to build a more complex Express application by using popular Express techniques.