[keithwhor]

I've experienced this pain point (exceedingly complex systems) over and over again, and it's something I'm pretty passionate about. There's a lot of experimentation in JavaScriptLand that involves doing something cool or novel while totally forgetting about managing complexity. This is exactly why I built Nodal [1], I just wanted a fast, easy solution to build API servers.

We're a new thing, but the focus is on simplicity and how easy the system is to grok. The goal is to reduce complexity via separation of concerns as related to systems, not just programming modules (actually, Nodal itself is opinionated and some parts are tightly coupled. The argument there is consistency within the service to keep it easy to reason about. There's no DSL outside of the ORM, which reads like Django's. Just ES6 JavaScript.) We're not trying to compete in the space of "real-time apps" at all, because microservice architectures are tried, tested, and much easier to reason about (at the expense of having separate codebases - which I actually view as a positive).

I did a write-up about it this week [2] and we're focused on trying to tackle pain points re: web app complexity as best we can.

1. http://nodaljs.com/

2. https://medium.com/@keithwhor/hello-nodal-why-we-re-building...