Programming Articles

In the last two parts of this article series, you created a web server using Node.js, Express, and JavaScript. You built a series of API routes to retrieve an array of products and a single product, searched for a set of products, and added, edited, and deleted products. The product data was retrieved from a connection to a SQL Server database. In this article, part three of the series, you'll build a website using Node.js and Express to serve web pages. You're going to see how to use a templating engine, Mustache, to create dynamic web pages from the data retrieved from API calls. To communicate from your website to your Web API server, you must configure cross-domain resource sharing (CORS). You'll see how to enable CORS in your Web API project. You'll then build a set of search, add, edit, and delete pages that make calls to your Web APIs.

In Part 1 of this article series, you created a web server using Node.js, Express, and JavaScript. You built a series of API routes used to retrieve an array of product objects, search for a single object or a set of objects, and add, edit, and delete objects. In this article, you'll move some of the hard-coded values from the code into a configuration file and read those settings into your application. You're going to add middleware functions to handle exceptions. You're going to write different types of errors to different locations, such as to the console and to a file. Thus far, the set of product data coming from the API calls has been from a JSON file. In this article, you'll learn to retrieve the same data, but from a SQL Server table.

Many developers use JavaScript to add client-side functionality to their web pages. JavaScript can be used to create server-side web pages and Web APIs too. In this three-part article series, you're introduced to Node.js and Express and you'll learn their roles in the creation of a web server. You're going to build a new web server from scratch, create some routes to return data, and learn how to modularize your web application. You'll be guided step-by-step to creating a set of APIs to return an array of objects or a single object, search for a set of objects, and add, edit, and delete objects. If you've never used Node.js or Express to build a server, don't worry: this article has everything you need to learn the basics of working with these two powerful tools.