Disclaimer: When I wrote this I knew absolutely nothing about Node. Now I know that Node is about as much of a framework as the Ruby language itself. But will keep this here... for science.

I've devoted quite a few days in the past month to learning Ruby on Rails. This decision seemed logical: since I was a beginner, I needed a framework and language that would be easy to comprehend (hence Ruby). Also, I'd seen that many applications use the framework and that many freelancers specialize in programming it. Hey, it's "easy" and there's demand! I was in.

Rails specializes in MVC control and stability. Years of use have created a stable public build with persistent conventions and thriving community. With Ruby as a clean and readable language, writing models, controllers, and views is pleasant. Rails also provides useful data structures like the session and flash hashes which "remember" your activities even when you leave the application.

Something that Rails lacks in, however, is a clean front end. It produces views using embedded ruby in html, which is essentially just using html. The essence of web UI is javascript, which Rails has trouble implementing. Rails is great for large application back-ends, but, on it's own, can't serve data to the user in a efficient, modern way. Despite this, the giant community around Rails has developed multiple plugins for modern front-end Javascript frameworks such as Angular.

Node.js

Is a framework, leveraging the power of javascript, that "uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that make it perfect for data-intensive, real-time apps"...I left out the rest but that's the gist. Max Ogden, director of OaklandJS, describes the situation well:

Rails, the popular web framework, is great for modeling complex business logic, e.g. using code to represent real-life business objects like accounts, loans, etc. Node.js could address that, but since it is designed for I/O problems and doesn't understand "business logic", there would be definite drawbacks.

Node shines in delivering data in a non-blocking way from multiple sources. This works well for views because it allows a programmer to create single-page apps, which are the epitomy of good UI in my opinion. Furthermore, since it is written in javascript it can integrate other useful javascript libraries such as AngularJS with ease.

However, Node.js doesn't provide a total web framework solution. It would be interesting to learn a web framework implementation of Node.js such as Sails which intends to replicate Rails.

What to do?

The question of my day is, continue learning Rails, which is designed for business logic back-ends, or start learning javascript and Node.js, which allows for rapid creation of applications with highly successful UI. When it comes down to it, right now I'm interested in getting an app running, top-to-bottom. While it seems like Rails is the easy choice because of my studying thus far and the agility of development, learning a javascript based framework will allow for much more freedom in designing a cool front-end. Since my app is going to be small and not really trying to do business, it sure as hell should have a nice UI. It may be time to dabble in UX while I don't have any business to worry about.