Apples and oranges. You're comparing SPA paraphernalia with a library that basically gives you a sane cross browser JS API's and some goodies. Yes, you can dev

Apples and oranges. You're comparing SPA paraphernalia with a library that basically gives you a sane cross browser JS API's and some goodies. Yes, you can develop highly interactive, reasonably complex web apps with jQuery, but then you would have to develop a lot of abstractions, guidelines and whatnot to keep the thing from exploding. That's pretty much what those SPA libraries and frameworks are. About server side, IMO there's no inherent advantage on picking node over java other than the fact you'll have one less language in your stack(or not, since you may end up using TypeScript or some other compile-to-js language).