If you're intrigued by Meteor and real-time apps but are turned off by the need to live in the Meteor ecosystem and the magicness of it all, I highly recommend

If you're intrigued by Meteor and real-time apps but are turned off by the need to live in the Meteor ecosystem and the magicness of it all, I highly recommend checking out Feathers[1]. Feathers is built on top of Express and Socket.IO so there is no magic, all Express middleware works, and you can use whatever client-side framework you prefer, it just gives you the real-time benefits for free without the commitment you have to make by switching to a big framework like Meteor. (I'm not affiliated with Feathers, just a fan). [1]http://feathersjs.com/ http://feathersjs.com/