I'm using the Apache Web Server and CouchDB as a backend along with PouchDB-(with a few plugins), jQuery, and Bootstrap on the front end. Apps built this way ru

I'm using the Apache Web Server and CouchDB as a backend along with PouchDB-(with a few plugins), jQuery, and Bootstrap on the front end. Apps built this way run almost entirely on the client side. On the server side I use Perl to code whatever few chores I need there. It's probably fair to say React is a good alternative to jQuery but I've yet to find a compelling reason to spend the time learning React as opposed to getting stuff done with what I already know. In the end it's really all about productivity and after spending some time with most all the tools mentioned here looking for what was "best" I decided instead to look for what was "easiest" and ended up with the above "stack". I just released a blog app made with these tools that's distributed in a 10k "blog.html" file that will run on any web server. Nothing else needs to be installed on your server to run the app. You can get it Azartiz.com along with a secure CouchDB backend and upload it to your website to check out how this approach works. It demonstrates a "single page", run anywhere app, with user authentication, CRUD, full text search, user and admin accesses, and shifting the load of dependencies to 3rd party CDNs to reduce loads on the server hosting the app. Adding "Service Workers" to make it run "Offline First" is a snap using Google's "Workbox" toolset. I believe the learning curve to use CouchDB as a backend is the main reason most developers have shied away from this approach. They're kinda "stuck" using SQL and haven't realized how much easier it is to build an app that uses a backend DB designed from the ground up for "web apps". But... it's really easy to dip you toes in it now using the Azartiz backend and that blog app on your server. PouchDB.com also has a "Todo" app demo that can be plugged into the Azartiz CouchDB backend that you can learn with and it demonstrates a somewhat different approach than the blog app and CouchDB's "live sync" features that are really cool. There's also CouchDB backend services available at Couchbase (https://www.couchbase.com https://www.couchbase.com) and Cloudant (https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloudant https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloudant), and CouchDB is pretty easy to install on a vps service like DigitalOcean. Plus, you can install CouchDB on a desktop Mac, Windows, and even a Raspberry Pi, and use it to create backups and snapshots of your remote CouchDB databases, and of course, to develop your apps. This is an amazingly powerful, flexible, and easy to get and use stack. I've never been as productive with any other toolset. But I didn't have any love to lose or time invested in using SQL backends. That's a lot of baggage to leave behind for most developers.