TDP013 Web Programming and Interactivity

Node.js, Express & Mocha

Content

Introduction to the course and description of changes from previous years based on course evaluations. The structure of labs and projects is described. The lecture goes on to review Node.js, Express and the Mocha testing framework. It is important to constantly test your server application that you build with Node.js and then Mocha is a good testing framework. Together with Istanbul you can get detailed tests done along with information about code coverage.

The lecture also discusses the MongoDB database. Many people are used to classic SQL databases such as MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL, but there are a multitude of databases that do not store their information in tables at all. One of these that has become very popular is MongoDB. There, data is stored in the form of JSON objects and the database is therefore very suitable for storing data in simpler web applications.

Although you are expected to learn the details of the tools yourself, a brief introduction to the tools is given during the lecture and we will go through some simpler code examples together.

Lecturer: Huanyu Li
Slides (may still change): course introduction, lecture 1

References

• Node.js Tutorial
• Express
• Mocha
• Istanbul
• Istanbul/nyc
• MongoDB Node Driver
• coding style

Page responsible: Huanyu Li
Last updated: 2026-08-24