[jeswin]

First of all, nodejs is a great choice. Having to worry about just one programming language helps a lot. I'll add a few things I found out along my ongoing experiment.

1. Tests are essential in any project using a dynamic language; but don't write regular unit tests. Instead write a setup script. A script that sets up basic data in the store by calling various APIs. For example, setup your test users POSTing to /users. Whenever you need to go back to a clean database (which is, often) you can run this script. And of course, every time you want to test all the APIs.

2. Automate everything in scripts. Script your compile, test and deploy steps. Script emailing. Script your database backups, tar your image folders.

3. Refactor every time you get a chance. It is like having a bath. You feel like working on your app, code feels fresh.

4. Optionally, try coffeescript. The language often promotes good, declarative programming. Once you get used to the shorthand, you won't go back. Don't discard it after spending a couple of days on it; it might take a little longer depending on your experience level. Another minor benefit, since there is a compile step some typos are picked up by the compiler.

5. One of the big benefits of Node is that you could move things like rendering from server to the client (or the other way round) relatively easily. But still it is cleaner to just have REST services on the server and handle rendering on the client (with say, Backbone).

[ajacksified]

I agree with most of this - great tips. However, for almost all applications, you'll want to render on the server, and bootstrap data on the client so that the client can take over and begin rendering using something like Backbone. This can be done by dropping a big json object on the page for the client to read as it initializes it's Backbone (or any framework) application.

This will solve the issues you'll run into later such as

* SEO - search engines won't read empty pages (you can get around this with some hacks) * Performance - loading a full page is always much, much faster than loading half a page, downloading javascript, parsing javascript, sending off multiple ajax requests for data, and then finally rendering the first page * Accessibility - a version of your site that works without javascript is not only easy to build, but is easier for machine reading * Development cleanliness - building your site in layers (html / http only, layer on css, layer on more advanced css, layer on javascript) keeps your code from becoming too tightly coupled and is much easier to work with. Plus, this makes it much easier to work with less advanced browsers

It's actually quite simple to do, especially with node, where you can share functions to format data, or even run the same framework on both side if you decouple your code (Backbone's latest change to help abstract Ajax seems like a step in this direction.)

[gnw]

Great pointers, setup scripts and automating project chores are essential for creating a good workflow, saving time, and saving colleagues some hair when they get started with the app.

I've tried coffeescript but it didn't catch on with me. Perhaps I didn't give it enough time, but I got the feeling that it could get quite semantically ambiguous at times whereas if you stick to JS' native C-style form, the structure of the code is imperative and easy to follow. I also felt uneasy about what code was actually executing at the other end of the transpiler.

[latchkey]

a) You can always see the source output and it is easily readable. b) CS really doesn't do anything magic in the output.

Give it more time, the gains for CS are worth any negatives you can conjure up. do ->, classes, simple for loops, equality, etc.