Weekly Project 2: MongoDB, Express and Node Blog App

Something a little more ambitious this week, still pretty easy though. A simple blog app with MongoDB, Express, and Node. This was fairly similar to the first few steps of the microblog app for the Flask framework. I kept it even simpler. My primary goal was to familiarize myself with the Express framework and RESTful routes.

If your unfamiliar with the technologies used, MongoDB is used for the database to store blog posts. Node is a JavaScript runtime for server-side programming. Express is a web framework for Node. It is relatively simple and minimalist.

About the app

A blog app is a fairly standard tutorial for many frameworks. In the past I’ve tried to follow the microblog tutorial for flask. I didn’t get very far, and never completed it. For this app I followed instructions from the Udemy course The Web Developer Bootcamp. I highly recommend the course, I’ve been working through it for a month and have found it very straight forward, and the instructor is great. It is really good for beginners with no experience in web development.

For the user interface I used the Semantic UI framework. In the future I may do some more work on this project. I can flush out the homepage a little more, and work on the blog entry portion a little. I would like to set up a similar application with a Postgres database in the future.

Nuggets & Pearls

A few of the biggest takeaways from this weeks project.

1. mongod --dbpath ~/data/db to start the MongoDB client, be sure Mongo is running before trying to run the app
2. RESTful routes are the standard
3. I don’t really like Semantic UI’s documentation, it isn’t as easy as Bootstrap
4. node app.js to serve your app
5. Callbacks are a completely foreign concept to me, I must look into it more.
6. HTTP only supports GET and POST request, method override resolves this

As always the code can be found on GitHub