the routes in express

I'm really enjoying express. I think this is because unlike geddy, my experience with express is more closely tied to node itself than to a RVM pattern. I'm liking this, and learning more about node.

I loooove modules!

module.exports is currently my favorite thing ever. On the client side of things I stick with requirejs, so I usually go with a define([deps], function() { returns AClass; }); sort of scheme for my modules. In node modularity is baked in, so any file gets wrapped in a function that includes a module object to which you would export the module to using module.exports

express routes

Using the structure/framework created by using express [opts] from the cli, app.js includes a routes = requre('./routes') object. As it turns out, node takes that to mean "get the module in ./routes/index.js." Which is pretty awesome, but was originally confusing to me when I created ./routes/anotherRoute.js and app.get('/anotherRoute', routes.anotherRoute) didn't work.

The solution was actually pretty straightforward and seems to be a common pattern in node (though, I'm not sure how fond of it I am). Because node loads index.js automatically, I just exported anotherRoute in there. So to get the nice, modular and concise app.get('/anotherRoute', routes.anotherRoute), so I use these little snippets, quite nicely:

./routes/index.js
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/*
 * GET home page.
 */

module.exports.index = function(req, res){
  res.render('index', { 
    title: 'My App',
    style: '/css/style.css'
  });
};

/*
 * GET another route module
 */
module.exports.anotherRoute = require('./anotherRoute').theOtherRoute;
route setup in app.js
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app.get('/', routes.index);
app.get('/anotherRoute', routes.anotherRoute);

It still seems klugey?

I'm not really a fan of mixing concerns the way that ./routes/index.js currently does so. In other words, in a future iteration index.js will act as a sort of “route aggregator,” if you will, that provides one point of contact for app.js to route everything. Also my route modules are a little redunant. 

module.exports.anotherRoute = require('./anotherRoute').theOtherRoute;

should really be 

module.exports.anotherRoute = require('./anotherRoute');

and app.js would wire it like so:

app.get('/anotherRoute', routes.anotherRoute.get);
app.put('/anotherRoute', routes.anotherRoute.put);
app.post('/anotherRoute', routes.anotherRoute.post);

I could use req.method to call or apply this[req.method] from routes.anotherRoute, but I‘m not sure I’m comfortable with adding that concern to the module.