Express

Insanely fast (and small) server-side JavaScript web development framework built on node.js and the V8 JavaScript engine.

Visit the Wiki for documentation

Features (so far)

• Sexy DSL with robust sinatra-like routing
• High performance
• Mime helpers
• Redirection helpers
• Nested parameter parsing
• Full test coverage
• Extremely readable specs
• Test helpers (mock requests etc)
• Environment based configuration
• Light-weight JavaScript class implementation via js-oo
• Collections and chainable iterators
• ElementCollections / markup parsing via libxmljs and css selector traversal support via css2xpath
• View support (ejs, haml, mustache)

Performance

Extensive benchmarking will wait until a development version has been released. However for simple an average route and response body Ruby's Sinatra scored 1454 request per second using Thin, while Express scored 3600.

Currently Express can chew through 1000 simple requests with a concurrency of 40 in 0.262 seconds.

Examples

require.paths.unshift('lib')
require('express')
require('express/plugins')

configure(function(){
  use(MethodOverride)
  use(ContentLength)
  use(Redirect)
  set('root', dirname(__filename))
  enable('cache views')
})

get('/hello', function(){
  contentType('html')
  return '<h1>World<h1>'
})

get('/user/:id?', function(id) {
  render('user.haml.html', {
    locals: {
      name: id ? 'User ' + id : 'You' 
    }
  })
})

run()

Running Tests

Express uses the JSpec BDD JavaScript testing framework to write and run elegant spec suites. JSpec is froozen to spec/lib and does not require seperate installation.

To run all specifications:

$ make test

Run individual suites:

$ node spec/spec.node.js core
$ node spec/spec.node.js mime
$ node spec/spec.node.js routing
...

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2009 TJ Holowaychuk tj@vision-media.ca

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.