best resources for long-term projects in node.js

Until now I've been developing in PHP. Now I'm about to begin a couple of new projects, and I think node.js would be perfect for them. I read some general (internet-oriented) guides on the language, and I can understand them with no problem, but then it seems to become all extremely messy when it comes to put it all together in a real development situation (trough the usage of the many, many available frameworks). The best guides that I could find looked really dated when I tried to follow them.

Therefore I came to ask in person if you could provide me with some recent and vaguely complete tutorials/resources on how to develop applications (both server side and client side) entirely in javascript.

I usually tend to work only in long term (and medium to large scale) projects and therefore I would like to keep the libraries to a minimum. But I'm also not a hackery type: I like to be able to focus on the logic of the programs, and usage of frameworks is totally accepted. I just wouldn't like to be overloaded with functions that I'm never going to use (or could easily implement myself).

Thanks a lot for your help!

Node.js is built from the ground up on the idea of having a lightweight core that can be extended with any number of libraries (i.e. node core vs. userland). Thus if you use node, you will - endogenically - end up using a lot of little libraries (or libraries that bundle a lot of libraries).

The brilliance here is that you get to choose yourself what kind of stack suits best the specific situation at hand. Node's package manager (npm) is superior in this fashion -- it let's you manage very heterogenous stacks with ease.

If you come from a more opinionated environment like PHP (or rails), the amount of different frameworks and libraries can be overwhelming at first. Node.js does not enforce you to use any specific stacks or conventions, which gives you more flexibility to do whatever you like. In fact you shouldn't even think of node.js as a framework -- it's a JavaScript runtime environment on top of which you can build web servers (and web frameworks).

if you are looking for popular ways people apply node.js, a good starting point is checking out how popular (and dependent on) are various packages in npm (see https://npmjs.org/). Based on the popularity (and dependence counts) of packages, one could recommend using the following kind of stack:

  • Use express.js (based on connect.js) as your web application framework
  • Write server-side markup with jade
  • Use request, async and underscore as helper libraries
  • Use mocha for writing tests
  • Optionally write your application in CoffeeScript
  • Use MongoDB as your database (and optionally redis for like sessions)

Please note this stack is just based on what kind of library choices are popular among npm users -- it doesn't tell you what kind of stack would best suit your specific situtation.