Static content means exactly that: content that does not change. This can be HTML pages, JavaScript, images, and so on. Anything that does not need to run through a database or some external system for processing can be considered as static content.

While we will not be implementing a static content server directly, we will be implementing an on-the-fly static content generator. For those that do not know, a static content generator is a system that builds the static content and then serves that content up. The content is usually built by some type of templating system.

Some common templating systems that are out there include Mustache, Handlebars.js, and Jade. These template engines look for some sort of tags and replace the content based on some variables. While we will not be looking at any of these templating engines directly, know that they are out there and that they can be quite useful for things such as code documentation generation, or even creating JavaScript files based off of some API specification.

Instead of using one of these common formats, we will implement our own version of a templating system to see how templating works. We will try to keep it as simple as possible since we want to use a minimal amount of dependencies for our server. The one dependency that we will be utilizing is a Markdown to HTML converter called Remarkable: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/remarkable. It depends on two libraries and each of those depends on one library, so we will be importing a total of five libraries.

While creating all of the pages on-the-fly will allow us to make changes quite easily, we would not want to keep doing this unless we were in a development environment. To make sure that we do not keep building the HTML files over and over again, we will implement an in-memory cache to store the files that have been requested the most.

With all of this, let's go ahead and get started with building out our application, by setting up our server and getting a response sent out.