A quick overview of Express v5

Express V4 has been out for a long, long time. It had its issues, its weaknesses. Someone said Express was dead. But as of today, we have a new, improved, Node v18 based version of Express.

Here are the main differences:

First of all, all docs now use arrow functions… I can’t believe they didn’t before 😅

Removed methods

There were a lot of methods that had been deprecated for years (see, res.send(status)) and people, let me tell you… If you kept using them despite the warning… You’re in trouble now! You find a list of these methods on the express docs, but after 10 years of v4 I trust you knew already. Right? You knew.

What’s changed? The top 3

Let’s go through some of the changes reported on the migration guide:

🥉 Path route matching syntax

The bronze medal is going to the changes to path routing. Reading the migration guide made it feel like the new version is a lot more secure than V4.

First of all: what is path route matching? Have you ever created a new route using app.use? Yes? Cool, that first parameter is path matching.

app.use("/users", userRouter) //the first parameter here :)