Node.js Node.js Interactive North America 2016, 15 Dec 2016

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From YouTube: KEYNOTE: Express, State of the Union by Doug Wilson, Express

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KEYNOTE: Express, State of the Union - Doug Wilson, Express

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Hey everyone: my name is Doug Wilson and I've been working on Express for quite a while now and so I just wanted to kind of like come here and Mike wanted me to come and tell you all about like Express and especially how we've been working a lot on like some governance kind of stuff and how we've been trying to, like you know, improve the project management since we got moved into the node.js foundation earlier this year.

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So I want to start off real quick just in case anybody doesn't know what Express is. You know just give a little overview. So Express is a node.js web server project, so it's one of a bunch of them there's plenty of them around. It has been around for quite a long time. The first commit was actually made back in about the summer of 2009, and then it was first published MPM about winter 2010 and back then I was a user of Express before it was even on NPM.

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In fact, back way way long ago was never involved in the project took quite some time later, but I've certainly been using it for feels. Like forever and Express is actually pretty simple, it's really just a routing plus sugar layer on top of the actual base, node J, sh t, P server, so express itself isn't actually a server. It's just basically a way that this gives you a little bit of extra on top of what you get by just doing like HTTP, create server and node.

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So it gives you like declarative routing, so you you, probably if you've ever used Express or seen it you're very familiar with like app get nap dot use you just declare like basically what you want to do: real, quick and without making like a big switch or if statements in a one big function, fading basic straps, head away into the basic middleware pattern, so that basically, is like what the core of really like Express has been.

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So it's a you know, certainly a very basic middleware pattern, but it pretty much works for what was needed to be done and it has actually it's what helped make Express a large community. You no excluding the long tivity that it's been alive for so incubating project, so nodejs foundation had taken an Express jeaious in back in the early 2006. They call it an incubating project. What that means is it's basically it's.

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It was actually a fairly new saying, I think we were one of the first ones into it, if not I think maybe still the only one I'm not sure, um but it basically, it doesn't really change express itself, but what it tries to do is it tries to take like a project like Express and basically help them with governance. So, for example, we get mentors to help guide the project. We have two mentors that have been assigned from the node Foundation, which is Michael Rogers and James Snell.

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It helped outline the project governance so, for example, before it really has had no governance at all. It was just whatever you know. The person in charge just happened to say, which has moved through few people from the original author to at the time. It was I think it was basically myself at that time. But now we have like a project governance and we just took that from the node.js foundation they had for their incubating project. They actually had a big outline of a very basic one, and we just incorporated that into our project.

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We helped use that to determine what our founding core contributors were so over time as well. People have contributed the project, people have been active, people have become inactive for various reasons. Maybe they move to a different language. Maybe that they're doing note primarily because that was what they did at work and now their job changed. Either they went to a new company or not and there's you know they don't have an interest in it anymore.

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So we took the what was stated in the governance, as you know what it took to basically be in the project, and we applied that as metrics to a big project figure out who our base contributors were at that time.

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Basically, for the last, like bunch of months since we moved in there just to get like here's, this group of people, you know, let's start the conversation about all this governance stuff with this group here, so we can get something kick-started and really the goal of this whole thing is really to what they call Graduate, which is basically saying like this project. Has a good governance in place?

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It can graduate I mean it doesn't necessarily mean it moves out of the node.js foundation or not, you know, but it's certainly not an incubating project anymore, so they actually have a set of metrics in there that determine how you can actually graduate and I mean this high level.

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Is that it's a participatory project, it's transparent and it's effective, and so when we meet that kind of stuff we can apply to graduate and then you know we'll figure it out, but otherwise, while we're here, we have our mentors which of course we can always talk to anyways. But it's a very nice thing and they gave us a lot of starting points.

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So I mentioned that we started with that core contributors. So we made like a thing as part of the governance just by default, like called technical committee, which some of you may be familiar with that term from node core as well. So it's basically just a group of people who guide the project. So it's not necessarily decision-makers or yes or no. It's really just like essentially like a guiding I, think that there's like a technical steering committee as well and node core they're a lot bigger. So they have a more structure.

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Ours is pretty simple, just committee or just contributor or commit or sorry, so we just meet every other week to discuss. Just topics will always meet, but you know we may or may not have pre-arranged agenda depending on what happened between the LAT between the last meeting in that meeting and then we'll talk about whatever needs to be talked about either new ideas, things that we saw because most of us are all subscribed to everything that happens in all the repos.

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So we always see everything so we'll talk about like just different things that were brought up or you know, does it align to like folk. You know our philosophies. Do we want to change philosophies, talk about this governance stuff, which is a lot of the stuff as well. Just you know, over the last bunch of months we also go and we'll make decisions if there's objection.

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So if, for example, because you know Express, there's a lot with code, if there's you know maybe some kind of pull request or other kind of issue- that's just been there for a while. It's not getting resolved by itself in the comments, then we can always specifically bring up that and talk about it, so there's really sometimes specifically bring it up, just to say oh cool, let's iterate on this idea. This is awesome, and you know, let's do this next or hey.

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This doesn't seem to be going anywhere, let's at least what do we think about this and then we'll like put our thoughts in there. So we can. We can figure out what we're going to do, which is also I, think the note court EC does as well and then, like I said, will discuss new topics and align and direction for where we want to take the project.

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So here we actually have 9 TC members. Currently so I've put them up here, so everybody can see. They are Blake ran to myself, Yaffa Linus Nick Troy Jonathan Jeremiah. So these were the original founding TC members that we had made food based on our metrics and it hasn't changed since then.

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There's a couple stages for how people get into the TC, which is become a the basic right now has become a committer and then the TC nominates that person and into the TC, and it's I- think it's very similar. To course, since that's where we took our stuff from- and we just haven't had the opportunity just yet, but soon we might so that's a lot about that.

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I just wanted to also talk about some of the stuff where the what this organization is for Express, so a lot of people when they hear Express Jas, they think of just like the NPM module called Express or the github repo. That is, that NPM module, but express itself is actually like. The project which is what's in the know. Generation is really all of its pieces, which was split into three github organizations due to management over a year ago. So those organizations on github are Express j/s, which is basically the main project.

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You'll find our website code is all hosted there, Express Shea's comm. We have a discussions repo in there. They have this new thing that they just introduced.

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You can pin repost the top, so those are the three pin to the top of our github github org is the Express J's website, Express repo and the discussions board, which is just an empty repo for just kind of just some discussions that can stick around longer than like a git er conversation would and pillar jeaious is our next one down, which is basically we just because we decompose a lot with Express for when it came out quite a long time ago we had all these pieces that had to go somewhere and we felt like putting them all in Express, which is where they were started, getting a really messy.

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It's actually kind of nice to just go in there and it's basically just the obvious things that you most users would use. It's just the middleware, Plus Express. Basically so pillars are basically our next one down. It's basically meant to be our components of Express that make it up.

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The tagline is the built, your own HTTP framework framework. So it's like the framework to build your own HTTP framework kind of was the idea. So, for example, we have the the core router is in there so like you could get that app dot use app that getting all that stuff. Without anything else. You could just use that if you really wanted to then the last one is JSA CP, which is our low level JavaScript HCP related modules, so that has a whole bunch of stuff that was just like little wheels.

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A lot of people will never use that most of the time. Jalaja Thurs, though, may use that a lot more than people who just actually just write express applications. So we have lots of random things in there. A lot of like issue p based things like so specially.

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Like a lot of parsing and serializing modules like parsing and serializing, cookies or content types or content disposition, or arrange header and a bunch very header and stuff, like that, we have like some weird like conveniences, so because it's built on top of node.js HTTP framework, there are some functionality, you think is logical, but you have to like add like three event listeners and then, when another event, listener fires.

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You got to add a couple more and manage all that, and so we had kind of wrapped that up in a couple modules as well, and we just stick it there and it kind of gives you a little visualization I try to put together just a very, very simplistic little tree of just that would fit on like a a slide and be readable of expressing some dependencies.

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So just hang high, like show you kind of like what we logically were trying to like put these three organs in the layers so like at the top would be the Express j/s org set has expressed itself and its middleware, which are not actually dependencies of expressed, so I didn't bother putting them up there and then pillar JSS basically, would be the next level down. So we have the module called router, which is, which is the Express router.

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We have the send module, which is another popular one, for people to direct require that has all of our logic for reading files off the file system and then sending them out and bundling that up. That has things like cache checking for 304, not modified responses and cleaning up making sure the file descriptors are cleaned up, doing some things like sending partial responses for arranged requests and a couple other neat things and another examples, final Handler. So that's basically the final handler.

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So all the different things and express the different functions you put are the handlers, and so this is the final one. This one will if it gets to it, it'll. Just send a 404 basically and if an error is handed to it'll serialize, that error out and write it out and Express uses that as well. That's how it does those defaults for a four page or the default error page, if you don't put anything yourself and then underneath that would be the J's HTTP.

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So, for example, like the send module we'll use a couple, other modules like the e-tag module. So that's how it will just hand some information over and it will just calculate a simplistic etag it'll send data from the request and what it's about to send out to the response together to this module called fresh and then that module will say. Yes, you need to send the whole thing back as a 200 or no, you can send back a 304, not modified. It. Just has that little logic bundled up and then it had you know.

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Another example is the range parser module, so you no need to parse the ranges for those conditional requests or those yeah and then final handler, for example, will use on finished, which send uses as well to do things like clean up things on the request. So that's one of those ones where you get to add a bunch of event, handlers to go, get the same functionality, and so we just wrap it all up for you.

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So that way you can basically, for example, send will use that to make sure that no matter what happens, no matter when the event listener was added. So if you somehow for some how you invoke send after the request is already done, we still realize all that request was done. We need to actually go and like close, that file descriptor for you, so it doesn't just hang open, which used to be a problem, for example, and so we that's why we bundle up all these things.

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So we get a lot of questions about what Xpress 5 is so Express. 5 is very much really. um You can think of it as a marketing version. That's what people a lot of people like to know major versions, so we try to kind of like bundle. A bunch of things together into the major I mean they're, typically, all breaking anyways, but rather than each breaking one incrementally coming out, especially because there's so many books and all kinds of things on there. You know a lot of people use it for a lot.

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A lot of applications like myself like you, know, I'll use it for all kinds of applications, and you know a new major comes out and every time you turn around it and get difficult to keep track of everything. So Xpress 5 is of course coming I mean people always ask for it, but you know we're making sure that it is not only ready but actually has a good enough significant feature set. That makes it somehow distinctly different to actually really say: there's a difference between them.

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Instead of like there's these random things here and there that are not compatible versus you know not so, for example, native promised support and routing is the biggest one, so that will actually bring if we get that done. That will actually bring Xpress into the new es, I think 2017 stuff that has the async functions, so async functions just return a promise. So essentially that would actually add native async functions directly into Express.

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The solids middleware and handler could be those native async functions and it would just automatically work, and so we actually have a few different PRS and discussions going on about exactly how we're going to implement that in a way that won't be completely destructive to the entire ecosystem to get that out there. But have it really awesome, but you know we want everything to just kind of work as well working on improved template, rendering system. So we have right now, foodways use it.

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This template rendering system, it's actually fairly basic, there's a lot of issues with it. For example, we actually synchronously will read the file of the disk for the first time in production mode will cache the content, so we don't actually read it over and over again, but still that needs to be reworked.

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Improved query string handling we're working on so right. Now it's it's! We parse query string is kind of lacking. You can't really say you can't it always parses, even if you don't need to use it a lot of that. Actually, that's pretty much mostly done right now. Improve cookie handling, so Express will actually allow you to set cookies. But you can't read it. You can't even read cookies by default from Express, which is kind of nonsense, which is hard, especially when you need to read the same format that expressed.

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Was writing so we're going to get all that, hopefully bundled up together this new route, syntax editions, we've been a lot of people. We use. You know the string pass for routes, it's the colon. You know like foo kind of syntax.

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We've made a lot of tweaks around there based on a lot of feedback, and so it's not strictly backwards compatible, which is why we have to kind of wait for Express five, because it's kind of tweaks here and there for the syntax, some some weird edge cases won't work anymore and stuff.

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So we'll have to come up with a migration guide for that, potentially something like the jQuery kind of migrated module which would detect it automatically for you and we're going to decompose our project structure, some more so yeah and I want to end it on just talking about a little bit about kind of like a lot of stuff.

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We've been trying to do to get more contributors like we've, been working a lot with project documentation like we have a lot of goals that the Express project is but they're, just like in the people who run their projects as minds right we're trying to get them like written down on our website, for example, contributing guides. So we have some basic ones from the foundation, but we're trying to get them a lot more beefed up to be much more specific to express itself.

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The organizational structure I was just sharing with you earlier, so we're working on like a way to actually have that on our website. We just started putting in a lot of those supplementary modules. The readme is directly on our website that was fairly recent, so wispy coming we're trying to make it look, much more unified, better location of resources, which we've mostly done now. We even have our YouTube channel, which is art by or every off every other week.

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Meetings is up a link on there and we're going on some level up guides for specifically how you become a committer and become a TC member. Those are in our governance, but it's very wishy-washy, so we're trying to see if we can come up with way more specific ways that yet you can do that so yeah thanks. Everyone I hope you really enjoyed hearing a lot about Express in its new governance.

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