Three and a half years ago I blogged about learning Javascript and Node.js, and then again at the start of 2018 about my progress and also learning React, and I figured it was about time for another update! This time it’s been moving from Sails.js (which is a web framework based on Express.js) to using raw Express itself and moving the language from Javascript to TypeScript (TypeScript is basically Javascript, except with type-checking).
At work, we migrated the codebase of the server that runs our internal platform-as-a-service from Javascript to TypeScript, and I figured it seemed like a neat thing to learn. TypeScript ultimately gets compiled down to Javascript, and I started by trying to just write my Sails.js modules as TypeScript and have them compiled to Javascript in the locations that Sails expected them to be in, but this proved to be a fair bit of a pain so I figured I’d just go whole-hog and move to raw Express.js while I was at it.
I did a whole heap of reading, and ended up coming across this absolutely excellent series of blog posts that takes you through using Express and TypeScript step by step. It took about a month all up, and you can really see how much code was removed (this excludes Node’s package-lock.json file because it’s massive):
$ git diff --stat a95f378 47f7a56 -- . ':(exclude)package-lock.json'
[...]
151 files changed, 2183 insertions(+), 4719 deletions(-)My website looks absolutely no different in any way, shape, or form after all of this, but when writing code it’s quite nice having all of Visual Studio Code‘s smarts (things like complaining when you’ve missed a required parameter when calling a function, auto-completion, and on).
Having moved to raw Express.js from Sails.js means I have a much better understanding of how it all works under the bonnet… Sails is great for getting up and running quickly, but there’s a lot of magic that happens in order to accomplish that, and more than once I’ve run into the boundaries of where the magic ends and have had to try to hack my way around it. Express by itself is a lot more widely-used than Sails too, so if I run into problems I generally have an easier time finding an answer to it!