I am in the process of learning Vapor. You need to be comfortable with Swift closures as Vapor uses them everywhere. The SwiftNIO EventLoopFuture is prevalent t

I am in the process of learning Vapor. You need to be comfortable with Swift closures as Vapor uses them everywhere. The SwiftNIO EventLoopFuture is prevalent too and there's a rich API over that which I'm still getting to grips with. To my mind, the best learning resource is Tim Condon et. al.'s Server-Side Swift with Vapor (Ray Wenderlich publishing) but this book needs to be updated. Vapor 4 was released in April but the ORM (Fluent) and template engine (Leaf) weren't upgraded at the same time (June and November, respectively). The first half of the book was updated in September but everything else has been on hold waiting for the Leaf release. My progress through latter part of the book has been slow whilst I translate the examples and wrestle with the compiler errors brought on by my unamiliarity with the above concepts. Tim C. is on the case and is very active and helpful on the forums so I expect the new version of his book will be finished quickly. Anyway, to answer the question: Vapor should be nearly as productive as Rails once you become familiar with it. There's an offically supported MySQL driver for Fluent but no admin screen builder like you might find on Django, for example, so you'd have to put those together yourself.