Advanced Express Web Application Development

Your guide to building professional real-world web applications with Express

Overview

• Learn how to build scalable, robust, and reliable web applications with Express using a test-first, feature-driven approach
• Full of practical tips and real world examples, and delivered in an easy-to-read format
• Explore and tackle the issues you encounter in commercially developing and deploying an Express application

In Detail

Building an Express application that is reliable, robust, maintainable, testable, and can scale beyond a single server requires a bit of extra thought and effort. Express applications that need to survive in a production environment will need to reach out to the Node ecosystem and beyond, for support.

You will start by laying the foundations of your software development journey, as you drive-out features under test. You will move on quickly to expand on your existing knowledge, learning how to create a web API and a consuming client. You will then introduce a real-time element in your application.

Following on from this, you will begin a process of incrementally improving your application and tackle security, SSL support, and security vulnerabilities. Next, the book will take you through the process of scaling and then decoupling your application. Finally, you will take a look at various methods to improve your application’s performance and reliability.

What you will learn from this book

• Develop a feature driven Express web application
• Build and consume a RESTful web API using client and server side templating
• Secure and protect Express with passport authentication and SSL via stud
• Scale Express beyond a single server with Redis and Hipache
• Decouple Express for improved scalability and maintainability
• Support real-time application development with Socket.IO
• Handle failures with a minimum impact to service availability using clusters and domains
• Understand and cope with Express limitations, including when and where to go for help

Approach

A practical book, guiding the reader through the development of a single page application using a feature-driven approach.

Who this book is written for

If you are an experienced JavaScript developer who wants to build highly scalable, real-world applications using Express, this book is ideal for you. This book is an advanced title and assumes that the reader has some experience with Node.js, JavaScript MVC web development frameworks, and has heard of Express before, or is familiar with it. You should also have a basic understanding of Redis and MongoDB.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Foundations
Chapter 2: Building a Web API
Chapter 3: Templating
Chapter 4: Real-time Communication
Chapter 5: Security
Chapter 6: Scaling
Chapter 7: Production