is it possible to name routes in Express.js

There is no out of the box mechanism for that. However you can mimic Django's style like that: define urls.js file which will hold an array of URLs. First start with:

myviews.js

exports.Index = function( req, res, next ) {
    res.send( "hello world!" );
};

urls.js

var MyViews = require( "mywviews.js" );

module.exports = [
    { name : "index", pattern : "/", view : MyViews.Index }
]

Now in app.js ( or whatever the main file is ) you need to bind urls to Express. For example like this:

app.js

var urls = require( "urls.js" );

for ( var i = 0, l = urls.length; i < l; i++ ) {
    var url = urls[ i ];
    app.all( url.pattern, url.view );
};

Now you can define custom helper ( Express 3.0 style ):

var urls = require( "urls.js" ), l = urls.length;
app.locals.url = function( name ) {
    for ( var i = 0; i < l; i++ ) {
        var url = urls[ i ];
        if ( url.name === name ) {
            return url.pattern;
        }
    };
};

and you can easily use it in your template. Now the problem is that it does not give you fancy URL creation mechanism like in Django ( where you can pass additional parameters to url ). On the other hand you can modify url function and extend it. I don't want to go into all details here, but here's an example how to use regular expressions ( you should be able to combine these to ideas together ):

Express JS reverse URL route (Django style)

Note that I posted the question, so I had the same problem some time ago. :D

Another option that I don't see here is to just extract the route function out with a function name. If all you are trying to do is writing self-documenting code.

function updateToDo(req, res, next) { /*do router stuff*/};
router.put('/', updateToDo);

I found express-reverse to nicely solve this issue

https://github.com/dizlexik/express-reverse

It augments the standard routing allowing you to pass the route's name as first argument

app.get('test', '/hello/:x', function(req, res, next) {
    res.end('hello ' + req.params.x);
});

Let you build the url from inside a template by name

<a href="<%= url('test', { x: 'world' }) %>">Test</a>

Let you redirect to an url by name

app.get('/test-redirect', function(req, res, next) {
    res.redirectToRoute('test', { x: 'world' });
});