Express VS json-server

For those uninitiated, Slonik is a battle-tested SQL query building and execution library for Node.js. Its primary goal is to allow you to write and compose SQL queries in a safe and convenient way. Now, let's see how it pairs with Express.js.

The Express Generator package has only about 9000 weekly downloads according to its npm page, while Express itself has almost 30 million weekly downloads

Start by installing express, the vite-plugin-api package, and the Ably Javascript SDK:

Okay another update: https://www.npmjs.com/package/express

Express is also down. Can anyone explain what's going on? Are people really moving to Astro, Bun, Svelte? Or NPM is behaving weirdly?

In this section, we’ll walk through a secure implementation of CORS in a Node.js application. We’ll consider a simple Node.js application using Express.js as its web framework. It will serve as an API for a hypothetical online bookstore.

For the demo project, we used Docker to install and run 3 components (backend, API Gateway, and frontend) with a single command. We employed ExpressJS for the frontend web app, hosting our single page app at localhost:3000. The APISIX Gateway can be accessed at localhost:9080, while our backend API (it can be any API you build using Python, Java, NodeJS and etc.) is set up on localhost:9081.

Express.js

let's explore using TypeScript on the backend with Nodejs and Express.

ExpressoTS is a new developer-friendly TypeScript framework for Server-Side Applications. It's currently built on top of Express, easy to get a new developer on board, light and easy project structure, two different project structure supported (opinionated and non opinionated version), supports MVC, non MVC, architecture. The opinionated template was built on top of clean architecture, you will see concepts embedded in the opinionated template such as entities, useCases, repositories and providers.

A quick note: You will be building this API with Node.js and Express. Make sure that Node.js is installed on your machine. If not, go ahead and download it from the official website.

Our backend will be little more than a two-way translation layer between the database and the user interface (UI). Later in this post we will identify other responsibilities of a backend but our implementation will be kept simple to demonstrate the fundamental machinery and concepts. It is worth noting the backend comes in two parts, web server and application server. Both json-server and Express are able to facilitate these roles from the same URL. This is very useful for our tutorial because we do not have to configure the server to manage Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). It is quite typical for production systems to separate these server roles for all sorts of good reasons but for now it would just create an additional complication.

JSON-Server creates fake REST API with a minimum amount of configuration, it provides a simple way to create mock RESTful APIs and easily define the required endpoints, allows easy definition of the data schema in a JSON file and can serve as a reference for each figure in the project.

I thought about usingJson Server (hosting the repo with the words on Github to begin with), Googlesheets, or maybe Firestore (i would prefer not to use it ,to avoid extra costs just in case it gets a reasonable amount of users). It isnt a big app so i just want a simple solution for storing the words and fetching them.

There is https://github.com/typicode/json-server that is really useful for that matter

JSON server https://github.com/typicode/json-server

The API server is built using json-server. You can find all the steps to reproduce the feature in this commit.

json-server will serve in http://localhost:8000

In this approach, you manually create mocks to build the API client. The most traditional version of this approach involves creating mock responses in the form of JSON examples, while recent frameworks allow you to run mock servers based on those JSON examples and some additional custom configuration. This is the most traditional approach to building API clients, but also the most common to this date, and sadly also the most error-prone. As we discussed earlier, JSON Examples tend to be incomplete and often wrong. They’re also a maintenance burden and become deprecated as soon as the API changes. The biggest limitation of this approach is that it doesn’t take advantage of a full API specification, and as the API design changes, there’s a potentially growing drift between JSON examples and the actual API.

The best case scenario you would be using something like MirageJS, MSW, or even JSON Server, but mocking fetch is always an option.