REST APIs in Express

Learn how to build a minimal and flexible web application with Node.JS and Express

Most modern websites and web applications involve some sort of backend framework to handle data going from a backend to some sort of database. You will be learning about the basics of what a REST API is and how to use it to expose data to a frontend.

Node.JS is one of the most popular and most powerful choices for desigining a website backend. In this talk, you will be learning about how Node.JS is used today to power websites as well as how to use a popular framework called Express to simplify developing a server.

After this talk, there will be a workshop where participants will get a hands-on experience working on building a basic Express app and testing their endpoints using Postman.

How to Attend

Bring a computer with a web browser and a text editor installed. You will also need to install Node.JS and Postman.

Lab

Here are some resources that we will use for this workshop:

• Slides
• Lab

Resources

• Documentation

Here are some resources from the past iteration of Web Dev Weekends:

• Slides
• Tutorial
• Example website
• Repository for webdevblog example and resources

Some helpful links to learn more about Node.JS and further topics:

• Node.JS Crash Course
• Node.JS with MongoDB
• Using Mongoose to simplify the MongoDB interface
• Node.JS Authentication with JWT