Express a framework for writing a web server in Node. It is practically essential framework to know for node,js dev and it is used by overwhelming majority of node.js web servers as core framework which powers more complex frameworks. It can serve a variety of content, including raw JSON and HTML templates. In this users have a lot of flexibility. We can write HTML templates in style of choice and have the server substitute variables directly into the markup before sending the page to the client. Alternately, we can write just an API with Express and build a front-end client which interfaces with the API. Express can handle the API calls from React and also can take care of the server side rendering of the app if one plan to do so. As for the SQL server, express has adapters for almost all the databases and it has one for SQL as well. We can also use Sequelize as an ORM for the SQL in express. Express is a pretty good framework. It’s the most popular node application framework infact. Express is widely used as middleware in node apps as it helps to organize your app into a MVC architecture. It’s the E of the popular MEAN stack. Express manages following things very easily:
- Routing
- Sessions
- HTTP requests
- Error handling
At times writing code from scratch for above things can be time consuming. But by using express it’s only a matter of few methods. Express also helps in organizing your code. EXPRESS.JS is a light-weight Web framework for Node.js which means we can build web applications using JavaScript. Since it is light, one can do many things faster and with less lines of code, than a traditional Web application built using multiple technologies.
- Express supports MVC Architecture with little bit of work.
- One can build RESTful APIs faster.
- We can use many templating languages like Jade or EJS which reduce the amount of HTML code we have to write for a page.
- Has support for NoSQL databases out of the box.
- It provides convenient, basic web-server creation/routing tools, which so essential to bare-bones node,js
- It uses very flexible, modular middleware pattern, where special middleware modules used to process different requests.
- It is very friendly to functional programming and usage of Node.js core concepts – Event-emitters, Async flow and Streams.
- It requires almost nothing to create and run the easy testable web server