I don't know about stripe compatibility, but... For the easy-to-learn part: absolutely use node.js. And just use take the learning curve of a few days to look

I don't know about stripe compatibility, but... For the easy-to-learn part: absolutely use node.js. And just use take the learning curve of a few days to look at some more advanced frameworks instead of bare-metal node.js. I highly recommend sails.js[1] (incredible fast API building for production-ready systems) or derby.js[2] (if you like to have extensive code-reuse for server/client). [1] homepage: http://sailsjs.org/# http://sailsjs.org/#! ; sailscasts: http://irlnathan.github.io/sailscasts/ http://irlnathan.github.io/sailscasts/ [2] http://derbyjs.com/ http://derbyjs.com/