Back of an Envelope Node.js Framework - Discuss

I had a quiet afternoon today and while "keeping up with recent developments in my field" or as you might call it "wasting my afternoon googling" I got to thinking what I'd like a Node.js MVC framework should or could contain.

How design shouldn't be done

Firstly, I've been playing with Node.js for about three weeks now and I'm impressed, but I can't seem to find a framework that I'm happy with. Backbone looked good, but I wasted three days on it and it was too much like hard work. Similarly Spine which tried to be less complicated, but eventually failed. Finally I really wanted Brunch to work but it was a release behind backbone (which is a major component of it) and I didn't want to get lost in the mismatching documentation (the Backbone release was pretty major).

I have spent a whole lot of time over the last couple of years using python frameworks, especially Flask and I like their approach of starting with a good foundation (in their case Werkzeug) and adding the bits that are still needed. Could that work with Node? I mean writing a basic HTTP server looks pretty straight forward and there are tons of modules to add the other functionality.

So with this possibly naive starting position I grabbed my pen and scribble down some stuff I thought I'd need. Now bear in mind that I haven't much used any of these modules yet, and I pinched several of them from the bits that go to make up Brunch.


I'd appreciate any feedback, suggestions and so on that those more learned than I might care to offer. Few of you will be less learned I imagine.


Here are the transcribed notes with some links:

Server

• Simple Node.js
• Express

Routing

• choose a module
• Express?

Data Store

• Mongo?
• CouchDB?
• Barricane-db

Models

• JS Object/JSON?
• ORM?

Views
    -CSS

• lesscss ?
• Stylus ?

    -Templating

• mustache(js) ?
• Eco (coffeescript)

Controllers

• Plain Old JS
• CoffeeScript?
• jQuery
• Underscore.js
• Quip (responses) ?

Middleware

• how? Express

Other Stuff

• node-boilerplate?
• Stitch (glue)
• Cake

If you spot any typos, inaccuracies or just plain lies then please let me know.