Throughout this book, we've focused exclusively on using Express.js as our web framework of choice, primarily because it's one of the most popular web development frameworks for Node.js. It has been around for quite a while and is very widely used. However, there are a number of alternate frameworks available that I want to introduce you to. Some of these frameworks are much more powerful and robust than Express.js, while others are right in line with it, or slightly less feature packed.

In this chapter, we will take a brief look at the following frameworks:

• Koa
• Meteor
• Sails
• Flatiron
• total.js
• loopback
• Hapi

At the end, we will use one of these frameworks that is Hapi to build a server API. This server API will be consumed by a client-side application build in Angular 4 in the next chapter. The whole purpose of building this web application is to study how can we choose a framework based on a project and how different frameworks have different bits and pieces of their own, yet build on the common platform of Node.js.