Forem: Ramanand Thakur

🚀 Introduction to Express.js – the framework that changed Node forever

Ramanand Thakur — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:34:00 +0000

Express.js made backend development in JavaScript ridiculously simple. Before Express, building APIs in Node felt like assembling IKEA furniture without the manual 😅.

🧠 The JavaScript Revolution

There was a time when JavaScript lived only inside browsers.

Frontend? JavaScript.
Backend? Mostly PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, or .NET.

Then came Node.js in 2009 and everything changed.

Suddenly, developers could write JavaScript on both:

🖥️ Client side (browser)
🌐 Server side (backend)

Yes, this was a massive shift.

Teams no longer needed separate frontend and backend language expertise. One language could handle:

UI rendering
API development
Real-time chat apps
Streaming
File handling
Even CLI tools

And this is where Express.js entered like a Bollywood hero in slow motion 🎬.

⚡ Introducing Express

Express.js is a lightweight web framework built on top of Node.js.

Think of Node.js as the raw engine of a car 🚗.

Express gives you:

Steering wheel
Dashboard
Brakes
Air conditioning
And sane defaults 😄

Without Express, building APIs in pure Node means manually handling:

Routing
Headers
Request parsing
Response formatting
Middleware chaining

Express simplifies all of that.

📦 Installing Express

Prerequisites

Node.js v18+
Basic JavaScript knowledge (Watch any quick 30 minutes tutorial on YT)
npm installed
☕ 2 cups of coffee

🛠️ Your First Express Server

mkdir express-demo
cd express-demo

npm init -y
npm install express

Now create server.js.

// Node v20 + Express 4

const express = require('express');

const app = express();

// Route handler
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
  res.send('Hello from Express 🚀');
});

// Start server
app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log('Server running on http://localhost:3000');
});

Run it:

node server.js

Open browser:

http://localhost:3000

And boom 💥 — backend server ready in less than 10 lines.

🌍 Server-side vs Client-side Applications

This is where many beginners get confused.

Let’s simplify it.

🖥️ Client-side Applications

Client-side apps run in the browser.

Examples:

React
Angular
Vue

Responsibilities:

Rendering UI
Handling clicks
Animations
Calling APIs

🌐 Server-side Applications

Server-side apps run on servers.

Responsibilities:

Database operations
Authentication
Business logic
API responses
Security

📊 How They Talk To Each Other

This separation is the backbone of modern web apps.

📜 A Brief History of Express

Express was created by TJ Holowaychuk around 2010.

Back then, Node.js was still young.

Developers loved Node’s speed, but building servers directly with Node’s http module was painful.

Here’s how raw Node looked:

// Pure Node.js HTTP server 😵

const http = require('http');

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  if (req.url === '/') {
    res.writeHead(200, {
      'Content-Type': 'text/plain'
    });

    res.end('Hello World');
  }
});

server.listen(3000);

Not terrible… until your app grows to 50 routes and middleware chains.

Express solved that elegantly.

⚔️ Node.js vs Traditional Web Servers

Before Node.js, most web servers worked like this:

🧵 Traditional Web Servers (Apache, PHP, Java)

Request Flow

Every request often created:

New thread
More memory usage
Context switching overhead

Works fine… until traffic explodes 🚦.

⚡ Node.js Architecture

Request Flow

Node uses:

Single-threaded event loop
Non-blocking I/O
Async processing

This is why Node became insanely popular for:

Real-time apps
APIs
Streaming
Chat systems
Notification services

☕ Caffeine Scale

Topic	Complexity
Basic Express routes	☕
Middleware	☕☕
Event loop internals	☕☕☕☕

🌱 The Node Ecosystem

One of Node’s biggest strengths is the ecosystem.

The package manager npm exploded in popularity because developers could share reusable libraries instantly.

Today there are millions of packages.

Some famous ones:

Package	Purpose
`express`	Web framework
`mongoose`	MongoDB ORM
`socket.io`	Real-time communication
`dotenv`	Environment variables
`jsonwebtoken`	JWT authentication
`nodemon`	Auto restart during development

📄 Licensing

Express is open-source software released under the MIT License.

That means:

✅ Free to use
✅ Free to modify
✅ Free for commercial projects

This openness helped Express spread rapidly across startups and enterprises alike.

Even huge companies adopted it because there were no painful licensing restrictions.

❌ Common Beginner Mistakes

(Try these fixes you face issue running your first express backend)

1️⃣ Forgetting Middleware

// ❌ req.body will be undefined

app.post('/login', (req, res) => {
  console.log(req.body);
});

✅ Correct Version

// Express 4.18+

app.use(express.json());

app.post('/login', (req, res) => {
  console.log(req.body);
  res.send('Body parsed correctly');
});

2️⃣ Blocking the Event Loop

// ❌ Very dangerous for performance

while(true) {
  // Infinite blocking loop 💥
}

Node works best when operations stay async.

📊 Express vs Traditional Backend Frameworks

Feature	Express.js	Traditional Java Frameworks
Language	JavaScript	Java
Performance	Excellent for I/O	Excellent for CPU-heavy work
Learning Curve	Easy	Moderate
Boilerplate	Minimal	Often verbose
Real-time Support	Excellent	Good
Startup Speed	Fast	Slower

🎯 Conclusion

Express.js became popular because it made backend development:

Simpler
Faster
More readable
More JavaScript-friendly

Key takeaways:

🚀 Express simplified Node.js web development
🌐 Node introduced a non-blocking server model
📦 npm created one of the biggest developer ecosystems ever
⚡ Express is ideal for APIs and real-time applications
🔓 Open-source licensing accelerated adoption worldwide

And honestly? Once you build your first Express API, going back to raw HTTP servers feels like manually washing clothes after buying a washing machine 😄.

🔥 What’s Next?

In the next part, we’ll dive deeper in:

Using the Terminal
Using Editor
Using NPM (Node Package Manager)
Event-Driven Programming
Routing
Serving static resources

💬 Your Turn

What was your first backend framework?

PHP? Django? Spring Boot? Express?

And have you ever crashed a production server accidentally? 😅

📢 Call To Action

If this helped you understand Express better:

⭐ Share it with another developer
🔁 Bookmark for revision
🚀 Try building a tiny REST API today
👨‍💻 Follow for more deep-dive backend content

Useful Android Studio Plugins

Ramanand Thakur — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:28:55 +0000

If you want to learn how to create Android apps, Android Studio is where your search will end. It is a platform where you can create Android apps for Android phones, tablets, Android Wear(Smartwatch/Fitness), and Android TV. Kotlin or Java may be used to create the backend of Android applications, while XML can be used to create the user interface (UI) on the front end.

1. CodeGlance

CodeGlance is a type of minimap of the full code that enables you to quickly inspect an entire code block. When the CodeGlance feature is enabled, the entire code is displayed to the side of the screen in minimap style, allowing you to rapidly go to the required area of the code by choosing it from the CodeGlance box.

2. Butterknife Zelezny

ButterKnife Zelezny is an android studio plug-in that lets you generate ButterKnife injections from specific layout XML. It is a very simple plug-in, hence generates Butterknife view injections with just one-click.
The major goal is to increase coding efficiency and make it simple for developers to instantly produce the code of the control binding view.

3. Vector Drawable Thumbnails

We often need to rebuild the project in order to see a vector drawable XML file. We can quickly preview all of the vector drawables using Vector Drawable Thumbnails.

4. Rainbow Brackets

5. Android Drawable Preview

When creating an Android app, you'll need a variety of drawable components. When working on a large project, it might be difficult to recall which drawable you used. Figuring this out takes a lot of time and effort.
This plugin solves this issue by replacing the project view's default file icons with previews of the drawable you've used. You can also browse through the folder to know which all drawables has been used.

6. The Name That Color

The Name That Color plugin in Android Studio will name the colour you currently have copied to your clipboard and provide the name of the colour that is the closest match.

7. String Manipulation

You can do everything with String Manipulation, including toggle cases, switch between camel, snake, and kebab cases, increment duplicates, sort, escape/unescape HTML, Java, SQL, PHP, and XML strings, and run filter operations like grep.

8. ADB Idea

It enables shortcuts for a number of emulator features that are often quite time-consuming, such as clearing the app's data, removing it from the system, or starting the debugger.

9. Power Mode II

Sometimes, coding can get tedious. but not while this plugin is activated. Your fingers are spitting fire and trembling as you read this. Every time anything gets dull to continue, I personally like to use this addon. Start coding while your favourite music is playing. It gets even better when your music syncs with the shaking effect.

10. Tabnine

This article would have been incomplete without mentioning a powerful tool like Tabnine. It is trained on over two million GitHub files and supports 20 programming languages. It looks for patterns in the training data set that may be used to predict the next "token". The use of tabnine speeds up development and helps get eliminate those annoying errors that keep popping up in your code.

Always keep in mind that adding too many plugins to your IDE won't actually speed up your process. Instead, it can substantially reduce the speed of your Android Studio. As a last recommendation, I'd advise choosing a handful of these plugins and experimenting with it and integrating them during your regular work. And continue with it only after noticeable improvement.