Building custom applications from scratch requires a lot of knowledge, time and effort.

Without a well-designed structure, the code of these applications tends to become quite difficult to maintain and hard to upgrade over time, often resulting in costly refactoring periods in terms of resources and money.

The easiest way to craft common applications these days, and more specifically web servers, is to use a framework.

What is a framework?

A framework is a tool that helps developers build reliable applications faster by providing a customizable blueprint that bundles the most frequently used functionalities for crafting a specific type of software, such as web servers or mobile applications.

This way, developers don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time they start a new project and simply reuse what is common knowledge.

By eliminating the structural overhead, it allows developers to conduct their tasks more efficiently by solely focusing on the implementation of project specific features, which in turn improves the overall cleanliness, adaptability and testability of the code, while reducing the risk of introducing errors and duplication.

The Express framework

Express is a popular, minimal and flexible framework for building web applications and APIs in Node.js.

It provides a simple and intuitive routing mechanism for handling incoming HTTP requests that developers can use to create all sorts of RESTful APIs.

It follows the middleware architecture, which enables developers to easily extend the framework's features by adding custom functionalities such as payload validation, user authentication, logging, etc.

It seamlessly integrates with other Node.js modules and libraries, allowing developers to leverage the vast ecosystem of Node.js for building feature-rich web applications.

Additionally, it makes it easy to serve both static files, such as HTML and CSS, and dynamic HTML pages using template engines like EJS or Pug.

It also offers robust error handling mechanisms for handling errors gracefully and providing meaningful error messages to users.