Introduction to using ExpressJS with MongooseJS and NodeJS - Part 1

First let's see what is this expressJS,

According to their website, it's a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications. Creation of APIs is easy and provides a thin layer of fundamental web application features, without obscuring Node.js features that you know and love.

 So without further delay let's start coding,

• Start by creating a folder for this project.
• Navigate to it and run this command to create package.json which helps you to manage your dependencies,
• npm init

•  Then install express on your project,
• npm install express -save

•  Now let's create a simple server using Express.First create server.js file inside the app directory.Inside the file type the following code,

•   Here, we are using express in server.js by requiring it.Then we have created the server using listen method.

• Now run the server using following command,
• node server.js
•  Navigate to localhost:3000 on your browser

•  You will see that kind of message,but that's ok for now since we haven't implemented CRUD operations.
• Now let's move into the how we can integrate CRUD operation using express.
• Type the following in server.js,

•  In Express, we handle a GET request with the get method: 
• app.get(path, callback)
• The first argument, path, is the path of the GET request. It’s anything that comes after your domain name.
• When we’re visiting localhost:3000, our browsers are actually looking for localhost:3000/. The path argument in this case is /.
• The second argument is a callback function that tells the server what to do when the path is matched. It takes in two arguments, a request object and a response object:

• Now,restart the server and you can see the following output,

• Let's change our app so that we serve index.html page back to instead.
• To do that we can use "sendFile" mehtod.
•  Write the following cod in server.js
  
•  The create index.html file in our application directory and add the following code,
  
•  Restarting the server will render you the following output.
  

 This is how Express handles a GET request (READ operation) in a nutshell. At this point, you probably have realized that you need to restart your server whenever you make a change to server.js. This is process is incredibly tedious, so we gonna take a quick detour and streamline it by using a package called nodeman in my next part of this tutorial series.

You can check out the entire code here