Chapter 6
Web Servers with Node and Express

Running JavaScript on the server has long been a dream of web developers. Rather than switching back and forth between a client-side language and a server-side language, a developer using a JavaScript-powered server would need to be fluent only in that lingua franca of web apps—or in a dialect such as CoffeeScript.

Now that dream is finally a reality. In this chapter, we’ll take a brief tour of Node, the preeminent environment for running JavaScript outside of the browser. Then we’ll figure out just what an “evented architecture” is, with its implications for both server performance and our sanity. Finally, we’ll create a Node back end for our project from the previous chapter, allowing us to persist our task cards in a proper database.