uexpress

Microscopically small universal express-like router/dispatcher

uexpress is a microscopically small universal (works in node and the browser) router/dispatcher that closely mimics Express, and indeed can be mounted in a regular express instance.

Install

npm install --save uexpress

require

var uexpress = require('uexpress')

import

import uexpress from 'uexpress'

use

my-server.js

import express from 'express'
import uexpress from 'uexpress'
 
import myapp from './myapp'  // myapp is a uexpress app
 
express()                    // the 'normal' express app
  // .use(cookieParser)      // .. express middleware
  .use(myapp)                // myapp is mounted in express
    .listen(8080)              // start the server

my-client.js

import uexpress from 'uexpress'
 
import myapp from './myapp'  // myapp is a uexpress app
 
uexpress()                   // uexpress works in the browser
  .use(myapp)                // myapp is mounted in uexpress
    .listen()                  // start the client

After the call to listen, uexpress will attach an event handler to window.history and route and dispatch a new request/response cycle every time the URL changes, just like express does on the server.

why

express rocks! Too bad it's only available on the server.

But why would you want to run a web server on the client?

I don't. But Express is much more than just a web server. In fact, since it's just an extension to Node's native http server, it's actually lots of things but a web server. It's an excellent router for one and it has a great request/response pipeline with middleware.

It has, in short, the stuff we need when we are building a client-side rendering app (a SPA perhaps). And even better, if we emulate it's API, we will be able to take the universal/isomorphic part of our code a whole lot further. We can define uexpress apps that can run standalone on the client, but can also easily be mounted in an Express server.

The best of both worlds!

Microscopically small

The browser version of uexpress (which is bigger than the server version) is ~3kB minified and gzipped.

It does have a few dependencies:

• uroute Microscopically small Express-like universal routing, ~1.9kB
• uevents Microscopically small version of Node's popular events module, ~1.6kB
• uhistory Microscopically small History API, ~0.6kB
• uqs Microscopically small querystring parser/stringifier, ~0.6kB

Issues

Add an issue in this project's issue tracker to let me know of any problems you find, or questions you may have.

Copyright

Copyright 2016 by Stijn de Witt. Some rights reserved.

License

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0) Open Source license.