Express.js vs Slim

Setting up a new Express project is very easy. It consists of installing a handful of libraries through NPM run a single npm install and everything is ready to go.

Express' extremely powerful routing API allows developers to do tasks ranging from building a REST API to building the routes for a simple web app and then take it to the next level by using route parameters and query strings.

With a little learning curve, it is a good choice for new NodeJS developers to get started quickly. Express boasts great, thorough documentation.

Node.js Foundation

Announcement here

The Node.js Foundation is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.

Being a somewhat old Node.js web app framework and being one of the most widely used frameworks, Express.js has matured quite a lot during all that time. It's more stable than its competitors and a huge community backing it.

Express takes advantage of Node's NPM to distribute and install countless plugins made by third parties which solve almost anything a developer would want to do with Express.

It's by far the most popular framework for node.

Express has a big community with a lot of guides and tutorials written about it by developers that have been using it for quite some time.

You can easily add oAuth integration/social logins to your next web app without much hassle, using this authentication middleware for connect.

Very simple and fast.

If you have not already checked out the Express.js ecosystem of middleware, you should.

Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.

Slim is minimal and that is a good thing if you want to start from there. It can be easily extended and even supports popular packages that are used in Laravel (like Illuminate\Database (eloquent)) for example.

REST fans will love the REST based architecture.

Rack is an interface used in Ruby frameworks used to group and order modules, which most of the time are Ruby classes, and specify between them.

Slim uses a simple concept for it's middleware. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses it unifies the middleware into a single method call.

Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more.

Slim doesn't demand that you stick to a fixed folder structure. As long as you load Slim the right way you can do anything from there the way you like it.

Paired with swoole it's a micro service powerhouse.

The Slim Framework is open source and is released under the MIT public license

You can add any dependency, package or class that you want to use as a contained dependency.

In Django most things are abstracted, you just call some function or class without knowing how they were built, but with Slim, you end up understanding the way some abstract functions and classes are built.

Slim supports code hooks for executing functions at different points in time during the application's lifecycle.