Well not always you need to use Express for simple http server solution, you could also the built in modules for this:
The result of requesting: http://example:8080/user?name=Mike&age=32
var http = require('http'),
url = require('url');
http.createServer(function(req, res) {
var path = '',
parsed = url.parse(req.url, true);
if (parsed.pathname === '/user') {
// Requested: { protocol: null,
// slashes: null,
// auth: null,
// host: null,
// port: null,
// hostname: null,
// hash: null,
// search: '?name=Mike&age=32',
// query: { name: 'Mike', age: '32' },
// pathname: '/user',
// path: '/user?name=Mike&age=32',
// href: '/user?name=Mike&age=32' }
console.log('Requested: ', parsed);
path = parsed.pathname;
}
res.end('Found path ' + path);
}).listen(8080);