NodeJS is a very popular JavaScript runtime that lets you design and build super fast applications. It's the core of most of both backend and frontend JavaScript applications. Most of the time, NodeJS is not used alone, but it is used with one of the various frameworks available. One of them is ExpressJS. ExpressJS is one of the most used frameworks for NodeJS. It's fast, easy to use and manage, and minimal framework. It's mainly used to build RESTful APIs and web applications. It's very powerful and easy to set up and use but, instead of other popular NodeJS frameworks, it doesn't provide you loads of pre-created parts and components to work with. An example is that ExpressJS doesn't provide you a native solution for handling user sessions. This could be seen as a good thing: you have the possibility to expand and integrate the framework with loads of libraries and modules, but it can also be seen as a bad thing: novices could find the framework too hard to work with.

In this lab, you will learn the basic principles of ExpressJS, and you will start your first ExpressJS server.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this beginner level lab, you will be able to:

• Understand the basic principles of the ExpressJS framework
• Start an ExpressJS server

Intended Audience

• Software engineers that want to create or migrate their application using a fast and minimal NodeJS framework
• JavaScript enthusiasts that want to go deep into a new framework

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this lab, you should have basic knowledge of JavaScript. To achieve this, we suggest taking the following lab:

• Web Development Fundamentals - JavaScript