> Right now, PHP+Bootstrap suffices most of my needs when it comes to app development as a freelancer. As for JavaScript, I've always treated it as a language m

> Right now, PHP+Bootstrap suffices most of my needs when it comes to app development as a freelancer. As for JavaScript, I've always treated it as a language meant for client-side scripting and nothing more than that. PHP still has advantage of having cheapest shared hosting. > Are there standard database drivers to access mysql or mssql or sqlite, for eg? Yes, for example https://www.npmjs.com/package/typeorm https://www.npmjs.com/package/typeorm > I understand that at a theoretical level, the event based async threading model of Node.js is truly innovative and since most typical CRUD apps spend most of their time waiting for an sql query to perform or network resource to be fetched, async should be the hot cake compared to synchronous programming. But that doesn't work out in practice for some reason. Async/Await is what has become available in Node.js. But for some web frameworks, it has required to do a lot of changes to change from Fibers to Async/Await, because Fibers has been deprecated and does not work anymore. Async/Await syntax is complex. So just keep coding your serverside PHP.