1. Oh, i personally start from top, too. But the people around me tend to start from the bottom, because most of them are used to rails. You know, choose a dat

1. Oh, i personally start from top, too. But the people around me tend to start from the bottom, because most of them are used to rails. You know, choose a datastore and start modeling/scaffolding right away, it's the rails way. That's why I inverted this in my post. I agree with you - the client is the most important thing to think about. When all is said and done only the client experience matters for your customers. 2. Of course, there are many solutions out there. I especially like Backbone for it's minimalistic nature, forcing you to nothing else than using something jQuery-ish thing. Since it's written by the same guys that wrote coffeescript (i prefer over JS), i like the combination of both. subtile thingie. 3. Yeah, of course it's not a real framework. But for some usecases, like providing special APIs, pure node.js without express might be enough. If not, you may pick express or anything on top of it. (most frameworks seem to be built on top of express nowadays) 4. Well both know that rails won't die the next years or even centuries. Personally i am currently employed as a Rails developer and see the mindshift... slowly but steady. Many developers are playing with it, don't find it amazing first time ("nothing new to see here, i can do this too with language XYZ"), but after some time passed, they realize what's different and they're impressed more and more. Especially startups that built their first release with a classic rails/mysql-stack and need to (often struggling to) scale seem to be interested to switch over. Finally, the most important point is: master JavaScript. This includes (!) stuff like Coffeescript if you like it. And then look at the vast and emerging ecosystem around it. If you don't need rocketscience-numbercrunching and/or don't have the tight constraints of embedded systems, nearly everything is possible. Take any other "server"-language, and you'll have to deal with tons of Javascript anyways. Just remove the mental burden you'd have with additional (fading?) ecosystems.