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I want to write a web app, an SPA. After many years of not caring about web design [1], getting back into the game is very difficult, even if my programming skills are more than 10x what they were back then.

I'm sold on JS, as to me PHP is very ugly and incomprehensible. My stack currently looks like this:

Node -> Express+Passport+Mongoose -> Bootstrap + Angular/Polymer + D3

I've only begun my project three weeks ago, but I would have hoped to have a prototype by now. Admittedly, I'm not working on this 40hrs a week, but still. I find it very hard to understand how everything fits together.

And then news like this appear, once or twice a week, which make me spend some hours reading on this or that new framework and how better it performs.

</rant>

[1] I did some flash, html and js about 6-7 years ago. Also learned enough php to be disgusted by it.




Have you looked at Twitter Flight?[1][2]. Quite easy to grasp.

[1] http://flightjs.github.io

[2] https://speakerdeck.com/anguscroll/cal


Thanks, I had never heard of it!


Well maybe it would be worth trying Meteor for you.

I've tried something similar, that is Rails + Ember.js, and I find using Meteor.js easier.


The app I want to build would be data driven. I want it to be as fast as possible (it will have to plot graphs) and I thought I made a good choice with my current stack. The big difficulty is understanding where each library/framework shines, how to couple it with the others and when two frameworks have some overlapping functionality, which one to keep.

The reason I didn't go with Meteor at first was that I didn't really understand how everything fits together. I needed to build a stack block by block. But that was three weeks ago, I will definitely read more about Meteor and maybe give it a try.

One thing's sure, I have to make up my mind sometime soon or else I'll never have a prototype!


Unless you're going to be wildly successful the moment you launch, you're better off picking one stack that you understand, creating a working version, then iterating to improve on it. If you try to do it perfectly or make it as fast as possible from the start you may never finish - and you'll never be able to test your idea.


but on other side, Meteor itself just for quick prototyping, it's quite easy to learn




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