Upgrade to express 4.0

[julianlam]

Branch express-4. Bonus points if anyone can figure out how to get NodeBB working again after commenting out the app.router() line.

Deprecates #267

[ThisIsMissEm]

I was tempted to have a look at this, might need to reorganise a bunch of stuff though. I think we can use Router instances to segment up parts of NodeBB into more manageable chunks, each with appropriate middleware stacks.

[preeefix]

I'll take a stab at it tonight. Parents may not be happy with events in school. (Schools are pretty much anti-phone down here, damn Github notifications getting me caught in class)

[julianlam]

Also blocked as these upstream optional dependencies are not yet up-to-date:

• Express 4 fail jdesboeufs/connect-mongo#103
• Possibly connect-level?

[ThisIsMissEm]

Looks like we can work around the connect-mongo issue, jdesboeufs/connect-mongo#109

[ThisIsMissEm]

So.. this is a pretty nice world of pain. Due to changes in multiple fundamental parts of express, I'm having to re-do all the routing and middleware loading. This'll be a biggen.

You can follow my progress at https://github.com/miksago/NodeBB/compare/express-4

[ThisIsMissEm]

Okay, I've gotten to a point where I'm starting to re-enable the HTML Views that are served, but hitting this error:

/Users/micheil/Documents/git/miksago.github.com/NodeBB/public/src/templates.js:76
        return template.replace(searchRegex, value);
                        ^
TypeError: Cannot convert object to primitive value
    at String.replace (native)
    at replace (/Users/micheil/Documents/git/miksago.github.com/NodeBB/public/src/templates.js:76:19)
    at parseValue (/Users/micheil/Documents/git/miksago.github.com/NodeBB/public/src/templates.js:219:10)
    at parse (/Users/micheil/Documents/git/miksago.github.com/NodeBB/public/src/templates.js:284:17)
    at Object.templates.parse (/Users/micheil/Documents/git/miksago.github.com/NodeBB/public/src/templates.js:39:11)
    at /Users/micheil/Documents/git/miksago.github.com/NodeBB/public/src/templates.js:66:30
    at fs.js:266:14
    at Object.oncomplete (fs.js:107:15)

This is when loading the homepage. Looks like the replace function receives an object for the value parameter some how.

[ThisIsMissEm]

Might be wise for me to jump on a call with the core team over the weekend to discuss moving forward on this, it's a pretty massive fork on the code base. It's gunna hurt merging this one.

[julianlam]

Hey @miksago -- thanks for looking into this for us. I'd like to caution you against too many large sweeping changes, since the three of us are actively developing, and merge commits will wreak havoc on your separate branch...

[ThisIsMissEm]

@julianlam yeah, I think we need to actually do a skype call and really chat about this before we do it. It's showing a lot of parts of the platform that could potentially be structured better.

[preeefix]

Am I allowed to jump on for idea purposes? 🐱