Table of Contents for
Express in Action: Writing, building, and testing Node.js applications

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Express in Action: Writing, building, and testing Node.js applications by Evan M. Hahn Published by Manning Publications, 2016
  1. Cover
  2. Express in Action: Writing, building, and testing Node.js applications
  3. Copyright
  4. Brief Table of Contents
  5. Table of Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. About this Book
  9. About the Cover Illustration
  10. Part 1. Intro
  11. Chapter 1. What is Express?
  12. Chapter 2. The basics of Node.js
  13. Chapter 3. Foundations of Express
  14. Part 2. Core
  15. Chapter 4. Middleware
  16. Chapter 5. Routing
  17. Chapter 6. Building APIs
  18. Chapter 7. Views and templates: Pug and EJS
  19. Part 3. Express in Context
  20. Chapter 8. Persisting your data with MongoDB
  21. Chapter 9. Testing Express applications
  22. Chapter 10. Security
  23. Chapter 11. Deployment: assets and Heroku
  24. Chapter 12. Best practices
  25. Appendix. Other helpful modules
  26. Index
  27. List of Figures
  28. List of Listings

Appendix. Other helpful modules

In this book, I covered a number of third-party Node modules, but there are myriad that I couldn’t get to. This appendix is a whirlwind tour of a bunch of modules I find useful. This list isn’t thorough and is by no means exhaustive, but I hope it can help you find modules you’ll like:

  • Sequelize is an ORM for SQL. In this book we discuss Mongoose, which deals with the Mongo database; Sequelize is the Mongoose of SQL databases. It’s an ORM that supports migrations and interfaces with various SQL databases. Check it out at http://sequelizejs.com/.
  • Lodash is a utility library. You may have heard of the Underscore library; Lodash is very similar. It boasts higher performance and a few extra features. You can read more at http://lodash.com/.
  • Async is a utility library that makes it easier to handle patterns in asynchronous programming. See more at https://github.com/caolan/async.
  • Request is almost the opposite of Express. Whereas Express lets you accept incoming HTTP requests, Request lets you make outgoing HTTP requests. It has a simple API, and you can find out more at https://www.npmjs.com/package/request.
  • Gulp calls itself the “streaming build system.” It’s an alternative to tools like Grunt, and it allows you to compile assets, minify code, run tests, and more. It uses Node’s streams to increase performance. See http://gulpjs.com/ for more information.
  • node-canvas ports the HTML5 Canvas API to Node, allowing you to draw graphics on the server. See the documentation at https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas.
  • Sinon.JS is useful in testing. Sometimes you want to test that a function is called and a lot more. Sinon lets you make sure a function is called with specific arguments or a specific number of times. Check it out at http://sinonjs.org/.
  • Zombie.js is a headless browser. There are other browser testing tools like Selenium and PhantomJS that spool up real browsers that you can control. When you need 100% compatibility with browsers, they’re a good call. But they can be slow and unwieldy, which is where Zombie comes in. Zombie is a really quick headless browser that makes it easy to test your applications in a fake web browser. Its docs live at http://zombie.labnotes.org/.
  • Supererror overrides console.error. It makes it better, giving you line numbers, more info, and better formatting. Check it out at https://github.com/nebulade/supererror.

It’s a short list, but I wanted to tell you that I love these modules! For more helpful Node resources and modules, you can check out these sites: