What's the Node framework landscape like?

I feel like it's been a few years since I've paid attention to this area.

Which frameworks are you working with, what is the most popular "stable/boring" framework, and what's new and interesting?

Comments

[Ryan Smith]

I recently researched Node frameworks for a project and there are a ton of options to choose from.

• Express - Still the most widely used by a large margin. It is a barebones framework, so much of the setup for routes/views is done manually. To extend Express, you would use Express middlewares to take action on the incoming requests or outgoing response.
• Koa - The successor to Express from the same initial development team, but has not gained as much traction as Express.
• Sails - A framework that is based on Express, but provides some MVC conventions and ways to generate routes.
• Hapi - This one has been rising in popularity. It provides more features out of the box than Express and there are plugins to extend it. It differs from Express because these plugins run together with Hapi to provide that functionality, as opposed to middleware that operates on requests and responses.
• Adonis - This is more of a full-featured framework that was inspired by Laravel. It has been gaining popularity and looks pretty slick.

Those were the top 5 I considered, but there is also Meteor, Fastify, Nest, Keystone, Hasura, Vulcan, Hammer.js, Prisma, LoopBack, and others.

When in doubt, follow the saying of "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" but replace that with "Express". It gets the job done and has the community support to back it up. A lot of the newer frameworks look very cool and include more features to provide a better developer experience, but it can be hard to choose and hard to predict long-term support for them.

[Shadid Haque]

Hmm I think sails is not relevant anymore :(

[leob]

Right, that should definitely be AdonisJS now, Sails is probably a thing of the past

[guledali]

The idea of sails.js was promising I think the biggest problem with sails.js was that it came out when node was still infant.

[leob]

AdonisJS is interesting and appeals to folks who've used Rails or Laravel (which would include myself).

The only thing that looks a bit weird is their homegrown custom "import syntax" (using a "use" keyword that seems to be taken literally from Laravel), instead of 'require' or standard ES6 'import'. But maybe (probably) their documentation explains the rationale behind that choice.

[Shimju David]

I heard the 'use' syntax is going to be replaced with ES6 'import' in the next version of AdonisJS v5

[leob]

Interesting! I don't know what the original reasoning was behind "use", but I assume it had some advanced capabilities which are now covered by standard "import" so that they don't need their homegrown syntax anymore ('import' is now supported natively by the newest node.js versions).

[guledali]

V5 is being rewritten in TypeScript

[leob]

That's also good news, I'm definitely starting to see the advantages of TS.

[David Wickes]

What's the Node framework landscape like?

[Vince Ramces Oliveros]

SkullJS - A comprehensive pain in the arse javascript framework that does nothing but give you bigger node modules.
LavaJS - A library which burdens your workflow and makes you quit the web development.

SkyJS - Another brick-end framework that does literally do nothing but add to your dependency. It makes you a cool DEV.

Please make this at the top of the comment section so that people are aware of the JavaScript ecosystem. 😂😂

[Basti Ortiz]

I can already tell that this will be the top comment of the week... 😆

[Matei Adriel]

And koas typescript support is much better than what express has

[Kevin Peters]

At work:

Our own server framework which is based on express. Frontend are mostly react Client side rendered.

Personal:

Express + next.js in combination with typeorm and postgresql. I call it the boring stack for me but it is really efficient to work with it. Ahh yeah typescript 👍👍👍

[Hamza Elmiqdam]

This will help ;)
2019.stateofjs.com/