Express into the wild

Whether we are trying to introduce a new tool into a technology stack at our company or simply want to experiment with new stuff once in a while, we need to ask ourselves the following questions before diving straight in:

• Is it still an active project or has it been abandoned?
• Is it mature enough or do I have to battle-test it myself?
• Which companies are using it in production?

Express is the most popular web framework for Node, with more than a hundred contributors and thousands of commits, the first commit dating back to June 2009. Its repository is one of the most watched on GitHub. These facts answer the first two questions, so next, we'll talk about who is using it in production.

Popular companies such as MySpace, eBay, Uber, and Mozilla use Express in production, and others have made their own framework/project on top of it; here's a list of them:

• Yahoo! created an MVC framework called Mojito that can run on both the client side and server side
• PayPal released Kraken.js, an opinionated kind of Express with support for localization, application security, environment-based configuration, and other features baked in
• Airbnb's Rendr library allows us to run Backbone.js both on the client and on the server
• Ghost is a popular open source blogging platform with an elegant UI that can be used either as a standalone or by being attached to an existing Express application
• Sails.js is a real-time MVC framework based on Express and Socket.IO that has a lot of advanced features, such as automatic JSON API generation, role-based access control, and a database agnostic ORM
• Compound.js is an MVC framework that highly resembles Rails: it has scaffolding, a similar application structure, a lot of custom helpers, an ORM with relations support, and built-in validation as well as other useful features