Introduction

JavaScript's history in backend web server development can be traced all the way back to NetScape's (now Mozilla's) Rhino engine as early as 1997 as the first attempt to create a robust JavaScript-based web server implementation.

The potential of using the same programming language on both the server and client of an application has fueled many explorations into creating different isomorphic programming frameworks, but resulted in only limited success.

Now, 2 decades later, Node.js has brought forth a new wave of JavaScript-based backend frameworks. Finally, we have realized the one-language paradigm for web development with an all JavaScript application stack known as the MEAN Stack.

One Node.js framework called Connect introduced a modular, compositional style of web server development inspired by Ruby's Sinatra framework. This framework quickly gained popularity in the emerging Node community and served as a middleware layer to many other Node.js micro-frameworks to form a modern...