Introduction to Express

To say that TJ Holowaychuk is a productive developer would be a huge understatement. TJ's involvement in the Node.js community is almost unmatched by any other developer, and with more than 500 open source projects, he's responsible for some of the most popular frameworks in the JavaScript ecosystem.

One of his greatest projects is the Express web framework. The Express framework is a small set of common web application features, kept to a minimum in order to maintain the Node.js style. It is built on top of Connect and makes use of its middleware architecture. Its features extend Connect to allow a variety of common web applications' use cases, such as the inclusion of modular HTML template engines, extending the response object to support various data format outputs, a routing system, and much more.

So far, we have used a single server.js file to create our application. However, when using Express you'll learn more about better project structure, properly configuring your application, and breaking your application logic into different modules. You'll also learn how to use the EJS template engine, managing sessions, and adding a routing scheme. By the end of this section, you'll have a working application skeleton that you'll use for the rest of the book. Let's begin our journey of creating your first Express application.