A Brief Encounter with Node

Throughout the book, we’ve used Node in the background as the runtime environment for the CoffeeScript compiler. This chapter provided a very short introduction to Node in the capacity it’s best known for: as an environment for server applications. With a little help from Express, we were able to implement a complete web application server in less than one hundred lines of CoffeeScript code. Imagine what you could do with just a few more.

We were able to set up a very handy development workflow, thanks to Grunt and Nodemon. CoffeeScript for both the front end and the back end compiled automatically, complete with source maps. The Node server automatically restarted. Perhaps the only major omission was automated testing—the subject of the next chapter.