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, 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 to you. Some of these frameworks are much more powerful and robust than Express.js, while others are right in line or slightly less feature packed.
Most of the frameworks that exist today and discussed in this chapter are still in their early stages of development; some have not even reached a 1.0 status. The use of these in a production environment should be considered carefully and under a fair amount of scrutiny.
In this chapter, we will take a brief look at the following frameworks:
- Meteor
- Sails
- hapi
- Koa
- Flatiron
Meteor is a simple, complete web framework with the goal of giving developers of any skillset the ability to build robust web applications in a fraction of the time. Meteor is pretty close to what we've used throughout this book—it relies exclusively (at the time of writing) on MongoDB as a primary data store and uses Handlebars for HTML templates. It features a handy CLI tool that you can use to scaffold new projects very quickly.
The Meteor website (http://meteor.com) is shown in the following screenshot:
It is quickly gaining traction and becoming increasingly popular every day—currently, its GitHub repo has over 17,000 stars!
More information about Meteor can be found on its website as well as its official GitHub repo at https://github.com/meteor/meteor.