I'm a total noob. Over the last three or four months, I've worked through a dozen books, dozens of online tutorials, and watched hundreds of screencasts teaching myself first Rails (along with html, css, etc), Node, JS and my favorite Coffeescript. I've built lots of toy programs at this point, and I'm really itching to get started on my first real project, ie. the startup idea I've had burning inside me that got me motivated to learn how to do this in the first place. I know at this point that I want to build with Node and Coffeescript. It would be easier, I think, to do it with Rails (due to the enormous amount of easy to access information), but Node just makes so much more sense, and it is definitely the direction everything seems to be moving in, and I think that its far more suited to the sort of very dynamic, user-involved application that I have in mind. Looking at the various frameworks out there, tower most definitely sits the best with me, and just really seems to be doing everything right.
That said, I have a couple of questions (actually hundreds, but a couple for now). First, is anyone actually already using tower for production environment, real-world, mission critical development? The impression I get is that viatropos already is, but I wasn't 100% sure because of discussions being held in the "issues" tracker on github.
Second, I've spent hours upon hours pouring over both the "finalized" documentation on the towerjs site as well as the wiki on github, and I still feel completely overwhelmed and unsure of where to get started. Tower seems to have so many moving pieces, and I think that really understanding how they all fit together can only come from actually using them, but being able to use them without understanding how they all fit together creates a chicken-and-egg dilemma that is quite frustrating. Tower has a lot of clear, well-written documentation, in fact a deal more than any of the other "full-stack" Node frameworks out there. But what is missing, at least for someone like me, is a clear starting point. The perfect thing, in my opinion, would be a nice tutorial that walks someone through the building of the infamous Todos app (or far better, something more interesting), explaining each step as you go, so someone like me could take that as a starting-point for gaining a more gestalt-like comprehension of using the framework, and build something with limited but full-functionality, that I could then use to begin creating something with more functionality.
However, as far as I am aware, nothing like this currently exists (and I didn't really expect it to, with tower being such a young framework), so I'd like to ask instead for some advice on where to get started. Does anyone have a full, working example of a towerjs app that I could look at in all its glory, play with, and maybe rebuild piece-by-piece to try to understand it, or else perhaps a list of steps to get me moving forward with learning it through trial-and-error? Or an other reccomendations at all?
I apologize for the long-winded message, and thank everyone for their time in advance. Towerjs is a really cool framework, and I eagerly look forward to seeing how it develops.