For what it's worth, I'm using express, and it doesn't come close to solving my plumbing problems.
Example 1: express can't reliably send a 500 if your code hits an unexpected exception somewhere down in the callback chain. To do it correctly, it would need to either use Node's Domains feature, or would need to use Promises. My own code uses Promises, so I had to extend express to respect them.
Example 2: I have quite a few modules that need to be shared by both node and the browser. Browserify is almost good enough, but to get it actually working, I had to find and fix bugs in four different npm packages.
Example 3: Then I try to add engine.io, which generates client code completely incompatible with browserify. To get the engine.io client included in my javascript bundle, I literally do a regexp replace on its source code.
Example 4: Then I try to add Ember.js to the client bundle. It's packaged in yet another incompatible way. I need to write a wrapper for it so it can find its dependencies, and so that the top level symbol can actually get exported other than on window. I write another slightly different wrapper for ember_runtime so I can load the models on server side.
Example 5: Does anybody do automated management of templates as clientside dependencies? It doesn't seem like it -- it seems like most people just package up all templates into one big pile. Well, I did some more plumbing, and now my code can say "require('templates/foo')" and template foo will automatically get precompiled into the relevant bundle.
Example 1: express can't reliably send a 500 if your code hits an unexpected exception somewhere down in the callback chain. To do it correctly, it would need to either use Node's Domains feature, or would need to use Promises. My own code uses Promises, so I had to extend express to respect them.
Example 2: I have quite a few modules that need to be shared by both node and the browser. Browserify is almost good enough, but to get it actually working, I had to find and fix bugs in four different npm packages.
Example 3: Then I try to add engine.io, which generates client code completely incompatible with browserify. To get the engine.io client included in my javascript bundle, I literally do a regexp replace on its source code.
Example 4: Then I try to add Ember.js to the client bundle. It's packaged in yet another incompatible way. I need to write a wrapper for it so it can find its dependencies, and so that the top level symbol can actually get exported other than on window. I write another slightly different wrapper for ember_runtime so I can load the models on server side.
Example 5: Does anybody do automated management of templates as clientside dependencies? It doesn't seem like it -- it seems like most people just package up all templates into one big pile. Well, I did some more plumbing, and now my code can say "require('templates/foo')" and template foo will automatically get precompiled into the relevant bundle.