I think "boring" is another word for "not frustrating". I recently did a project where I wrote the same API in Ruby/Sinatra, Node/Express and PHP/Slim; Connect

I think "boring" is another word for "not frustrating". I recently did a project where I wrote the same API in Ruby/Sinatra, Node/Express and PHP/Slim; Connected it to S3, GCloud and Azure for assets and MongoDb for data; and then deployed each permutation to Heroku, Azure, App Engine and EB. For "under the api barrier", Heroku was the only one that ran everything smoothly; S3 is the easiest to interact with, and as I worked through the project, I switched from Ruby to Node as the prefered platform. For "over the api barrier", where users actually use the project, it depends on the project requirements. In this case no dependancies was a hard requirement, hence Vanilla JS. But if you have a lot of UI, you'd need a lib for both JS and CSS and it depends on teammates pref, organization pref and legacy. My 2 cents.