Continuing with our discussion of various backend frameworks, we now turn our attention to one of the most popular and beloved backend frameworks of the current age – Express.js. As a beginner, it can often become very difficult to choose a framework to go with, learn and invest one’s time in via projects and tutorials, since one often does not know where to start looking. In these scenarios, it becomes incumbent upon new developers and beginners to explore their options and see what it can offer in terms of learning potential and developer experience.
ExpressJS is a free and open-source web application development framework in NodeJS that offers flexibility, minimalism, and is used to build web applications quickly and efficiently. It is a lightweight application development framework to organize web applications on the server-side into a more organized MVC architecture. We can build single-page, multi-page or hybrid web applications using ExpressJS. It is an integral part of the MEAN and MERN stacks which is used to develop and manage web applications.
Some of the main merits and benefits that ExpressJS are –
- Many commonly used features of NodeJS are provided by ExpressJS that are readily available, save time and greatly reduce code redundancy, thus augmenting developer efficiency.
- ExpressJS offers various middlewares, which are functions that execute during the lifecycle of a request to the Express server, in order to provide various functionalities such as access to database, client request management, error handling etc. , which greatly helps in the systematic organization of different functions of ExpressJS.
- A great benefit of using ExpressJS is that it enables easy scalability allowing us to scale our application quickly.
- ExpressJS is supported by the Google V8 engine which enables our applications to get higher performance without any lag or error in the processing.
- Express.js supports the caching feature, allowing page reloads to happen faster as we would not have to re-execute the codes again and again.
Thus, we can see that ExpressJS has several merits, benefits and advantages that make it an extremely popular framework for new developers. Its utility has made it extremely popular and has also made it as the base application for several companies like Uber, PayPal, GoDadday amongst many others.
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