About this Book
When we considered writing this book we intended to focus about two-thirds on the development of the SPA client. The other third was to focus on the web server and the services needed to provide an SPA. But we couldn’t decide what to use for our web server. We had written scores of web servers for traditional and SPA sites using Ruby/ Rails, Java/Tomcat, mod_perl, and other platforms, but they all had shortcomings, especially when supporting an SPA, that left us wanting more.
We had recently switched to a “pure” JavaScript stack using Node.js as the web server and MongoDB as the database. Though there were challenges, we found the experience liberating and compelling. The benefits of the common language and data format were usually so profound that they significantly outweighed any language-specific features we lost from the polyglot-stack.
We felt that presenting the “pure” JavaScript stack provided by far the most value to our readers, because we know of no other book that shows how to put all the pieces together. And we expect this stack will continue to gain popularity and become one of the most commonly used stacks for single page applications.