[rmgraham]

Maybe I'm weird, but I think I actually prefer the Express example. When I used Rails I found the biggest learning curve was actually learning how to get around the magic when necessary, leaving me craving something more like Sinatra, which Express is heavily modelled after.

From all I've heard about hapi, I expected the hapi example to be closer to the LoopBack example. Is there a hapi user who can chime in?

[skawful]

Agreed. Back when I was working on rails type projects we always wished we could just drop down into sinatra-ish APIs for certain things that didn't align with the "rails way".

Thats a +1 for LoopBack - its built on and extends express. You can drop from the magic into a barebones express route if you want:

http://apidocs.strongloop.com/loopback/#var-app-loopback