Bias: I'm mostly a Ruby dev, compile OpenSSL and Ruby from source. For greenfield apps, node has the advantage of being mostly the same language back- (node) a

Bias: I'm mostly a Ruby dev, compile OpenSSL and Ruby from source. For greenfield apps, node has the advantage of being mostly the same language back- (node) and front-end (browser). Hence why Asana and others use it. Python is more popular than Ruby, but they're roughly equivalent sans religious wars. The other thing is that Rails is a mature, well-defined architecture with tons and tons of gems. The bower asset packages can be used straight via # Gemfile source 'https://rails-assets.org' It's also not hard to get gulp and phantomjs setup. General advice though... Build outside-in. (Frontend first, backend later) Building inside-out can lead to wasting time building things that just aren't needed.