Introduction

The rapid pace of change in the JavaScript ecosystem has fueled the evolution of backend services to embrace service-oriented architecture (SOA) as the means of providing resources for client web applications. These backend services commonly rely on Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs as the primary means of communication with a front-end application.

The use of JSON to communicate via REST APIs is one that also unlocks a new layer of compatibility for a full stack JavaScript web application, such as the MEAN stack. Without a need to serialize and deserialize between different object representations, manipulating and working with API requests and responses can be done using pure JavaScript. Express, in its minimalist spirit, doesn't offer us a default approach for how to implement a REST API. However, it has all the parts we will need to easily build our own, using HTTP methods, middleware and JSON. In this chapter, we will discuss how to harness these fundamental building...