[rwhitman]

Really appreciate the breakdown. Its actually surprising me how little I educated myself on some of the components.

From what I know ExpressJS is more of a microframework that can be used piecemeal. Closer to Flask or Sinatra maybe? Or am I way off here? Do you typically use an ORM for the DB or is the expectation to query MongoDB directly?

[vijayaggarwal]

Thanks! MongoDB and NodeJS are fairly big projects and take some experience to fully appreciate. Even Angular vs Ember is not a trivial decision and its better to have some experience with both. I agree with czbond's suggestion of starting with smaller projects. It will also reduce abandonware risk.

Again, I don't know much about Express though microframework seems to be the right term to me. Hopefully, other community members will shed some light on this. Regarding MongoDB, an ORM is technically not needed as mongo is not relational. In fact, mongo treates its records as first class JSON objects and therefore is very object-oriented natively.

[rwhitman]

I appreciate your helping to knock some sense into me. I should know better than to go diving headlong into building large client projects in bleeding edge technology, heh

[krrishd]

Generally, if you're using MongoDB with a Node app, most people use http://mongoosejs.com as an ORM/ODM.