The HTTPServer object is very close to the HTTP protocol. While this is powerful in the same way that driving a stick shift car gives you low-level control over the driving experience, typical web application programming is better done at a higher level. Does anybody use assembly language to write web applications? It's better to abstract away the HTTP details and concentrate on your application.

The Node.js developer community has developed quite a few application frameworks to help with different aspects of abstracting away HTTP protocol details. Of them, Express is the most popular, and Koa (http://koajs.com/) should be considered because it was developed by the same team and has fully integrated support for async functions.

The ExpressJS Wiki has a list of frameworks built on top of ExpressJS, or tools that work with it. This includes template engines, middleware modules, and more. The ExpressJS Wiki is located at https://github.com/expressjs/express/wiki.

One reason to use a web framework is that they often provide the best practices used in web application development for over 20 years. The usual best practices include the following:

• Providing a page for bad URLs (the 404 page)
• Screening URLs and forms for any injected scripting attacks
• Supporting the use of cookies to maintain sessions
• Logging requests for both usage tracking and debugging
• Authentication
• Handling static files, such as images, CSS, JavaScript, or HTML
• Providing cache control headers to caching proxies
• Limiting things such as page size or execution time

Web frameworks help you invest your time in the task without getting lost in the details of implementing HTTP protocol. Abstracting away details is a time-honored way for programmers to be more efficient. This is especially true when using a library or framework providing prepackaged functions that take care of the details.