js-level-2-projects/06-a-first-web-application

06: A First Web Application

In this exercise you'll create a "classic" web application. What this means is:

1. Browsers make requests for a URL, like /posts/01-my-first-post/.
2. Your application receives the request, and generates the HTML.
3. Your application then returns that HTML to the browser which displays it.

This is a deceptively simple process that will combine what you've learned so far with the Express.js project version 4.x. Express.js is a minimalist web application server with good documentation that should be easy for you to use. It's the one I use throughout the course.

Your Application Features

Your application should do the following things:

1. Handle requests for blog posts and dynamically load the .md file to return HTML.
2. Use a template system that's separate from the blog contents.
3. Load configuration data from a file in secrets/config.json.
4. The configuration file should let you change important things about the blog like it's title, author, etc. and it will render the entire design with the new settings.

Learning Objectives

Your actual objective is to learn how to learn an API someone else created. It's very common to find a project you want to use and have to spend time learning how it works. This requires a combination of going through the documentation, creating a test project, and figuring out how everything fits together.

For Express.js you should start with the getting started to get an overview of how to use Express. Next you should browse guide of topics which is weirdly organized via the dropdown menu. Your final study for Express.js is to browse the Advanced Topics. After that you should work on the project for this exercise while keeping the API open.