I'm learning NodeJS following Odin's Express course and write here my notes. Each courses on Odin have a Learning Outcomes section for self evaluation, today I'll use it here as a template:
Describe Express and Node’s main benefits.
Node is a great choice for web development because:
- It's optimized for network speed and scalability because it's event-driven.
- The ecosystem (with npm) is big and the community active.
- As it's plain JS, they're easy to write and maintain with the front end (in JS too). Also, the popularity of JS brought many others languages to compile in it: TypeScript, ClojureScript, coffeeScript, Scala, LiveScript...
- Node is also portable in Windows, macOS, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, WebOS and NonStopOS.
Express provide tools and helpers for common tasks on web servers:
- Handlers for HTTP routes and verbs
- Integrate with view rendering engines
- Set common webapp settings: ports, location for templates.
- custom Middlewares
- Lots of middleware packages: cookies, sessions, login, url params...
Describe the relationship between Node and Express.
Express is a node framework: it provides functions to do common tasks. However, it's unopinionated: more flexible but harder to set up.
Explain what a module is and how Express fits in.
A module is a bit of code (usually a file or folder) that we can import in our code to add functionalities. Express is a module, so are express middlewares.
Import and create modules.
Import a module with require: var importedModule = require('./path/to/module'). Create a module with modules.exports = {exportedKey: 'value} or exports.exportedKey = 'value'.
Describe asynchronous APIs.
Asynchronous APIs handle actions that takes time without blocking the thread: the action run in the background and trigger a "callback" when it's resolved. There's various way to handle them: callback, promises, generators, async/await... The more important is to keep code simple, not nested and split up in small modules. Be carefully of callback hell!
A convention for node and Express is to use Error First Callbacks.
Describe and create route handlers.
We use handlers to trigger actions when a route is reach by a user. Usually, the action is to respond with a page! There's many handler methods to respond to different cases: checkout(), copy(), delete(), get(), head(), lock(), merge(), mkactivity(), mkcol(), move(), m-search(), notify(), options(), patch(), post(), purge(), put(), report(), search(), subscribe(), trace(), unlock(), unsubscribe(). They mostly use te same arguments: a pattern to match the route (ex: /about), and a callback function that takes as arguments the request and the response. Uses one of the response methods to return:
// code/02-route-handler.js
app.get('/about', function (req, res) {
res.send('about page');
});
app.all is usually used for middlewares.
We can group handlers to organize the code. Do so with app.use() and router.
Describe and use middleware.
A Middleware is a method executing before or after handlers. They are frequent in Express and helps with many tasks. The order the middlewares executes is up to the developer. It must call next() (third argument of the function) to pass to the next middleware or handler, or end the request. next('router') to pass controll out of the router instance.
Add a middleware the same way as route handlers: app.use('/', a_middleware, another_middleware).
We can find express middlewares on the official doc or on NPM. We also may write our own middleware. The express doc has pages about using and writing them.
Describe error handling in Express.
Express comes with a default build-in error middleware: any error occurring in synchronous code will be catch. For async functions, we can pass the error object to next(). Then the error stack will be sent to the client (if we're not in production env).
Customs error middleware must take four arguments to preserve signature and get the error object as first parameter:
// code/02-handle-errors.js
app.use(function (err, req, res, next) {
console.error(err.stack);
res.status(500).send('Something wrong!');
});
Custom handlers must be placed at the end of the middleware list, after all other app.use() or route handlers to be sure to get all potential errors.
Express error handling page
Describe what the main parts of an Express app might look like.
It really depends on the purpose of our app. Modules may be:
- settings: network options, middlewares...
- routes handlers
- database write/access
- [views engines](https://expressjs.com/en/resources/template-engines.html() (templates)
Conclusion
Express seems very solid and well documented. It's flexibility makes it a good choice for most off the apps. Many fonctions have to be added by third party modules (databases, views engines...), and it can be a time-consuming to make the good choice. Fortunately there's plentiful of articles and docs about them because of express popularity.
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