connect

What is connect?

The connect npm package is a middleware layer for Node.js, designed to be used as a part of the 'http' module. It allows developers to create a series of middleware functions to handle requests and responses in a sequential manner. Connect is often used to set up middleware that can perform various tasks such as logging, parsing, session handling, and more.

What are connect's main functionalities?

Logging

This feature allows you to log every request that comes into the server with the method and URL.

const connect = require('connect');
const app = connect();

// Middleware for logging
function logger(req, res, next) {
  console.log('%s %s', req.method, req.url);
  next();
}

app.use(logger);

app.listen(3000);

Static File Serving

This feature serves static files from a specified directory, in this case, 'public'.

const connect = require('connect');
const serveStatic = require('serve-static');
const app = connect();

app.use(serveStatic('public'));

app.listen(3000);

Body Parsing

This feature allows you to parse the body of incoming requests in middleware before handling them.

const connect = require('connect');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
const app = connect();

app.use(bodyParser.json());

app.use(function(req, res) {
  res.end(JSON.stringify(req.body));
});

app.listen(3000);

Cookie Parsing

This feature allows you to parse cookies attached to the client request object.

const connect = require('connect');
const cookieParser = require('cookie-parser');
const app = connect();

app.use(cookieParser());

app.use(function(req, res) {
  res.end(JSON.stringify(req.cookies));
});

app.listen(3000);

Other packages similar to connect

express

Express is a web application framework for Node.js, built on top of connect. It extends connect's middleware model with additional functionality like routing, template engine support, and more. Express is more feature-rich and is considered a de facto standard for Node.js web applications.

koa

Koa is a web framework designed by the creators of Express, aiming to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs. Koa uses async functions to eliminate callbacks and greatly increase error-handling capabilities. It does not bundle any middleware within its core, and it provides an elegant suite of methods that make writing servers fast and enjoyable.

hapi

Hapi is a rich framework for building applications and services. It enables developers to focus on writing reusable application logic instead of spending time building infrastructure. Hapi is known for its powerful plugin system and comprehensive API.

restify

Restify is a Node.js web service framework optimized for building semantically correct RESTful web services ready for production use at scale. It is somewhat similar to Express but is more focused on enabling the building of correct REST web services.

README

Connect

Connect is a high performance middleware framework built by the combined forces of Tim Caswell (creationix) and TJ Holowaychuk (visionmedia) and the other skilled developers of ExtJS. Connect takes the familiar concepts of Ruby's Rack and applies it to the asynchronous world of node.

ExtJS is releasing Connect under the very liberal MIT license in hopes that we can provide some level of leadership and stability for application frameworks to build on.

Features

• High performance api, with nearly no overhead.
• Several bundled middleware implementations such as log, static, and json-rpc.
• The connect executable for daemonizing node, and Connect servers.

Installation

Via git (or downloaded tarball):

$ git clone git://github.com/extjs/Connect.git && cd Connect && make install

Via npm:

$ npm install connect

Documentation

View the man page:

$ man connect

View the HTML document:

$ open docs/api.html

View the online HTML documentation:

$ open http://extjs.github.com/Connect

View one of several examples located within ./examples.

Running Benchmarks

To run the benchmarks you must have ApacheBench, and gnuplot installed, then:

$ make benchmark && make graphs && open results/graphs/*.png

Testing

First update the git submodules, which includes the Expresso TDD framework:

$ git submodule update --init

Then run the test suites located in ./test with the following command:

$ make test

Run a single test, or use a custom glob pattern:

$ make test TESTS=test/connect.test.js

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2010 Ext JS

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.