JavaScript, Backbone.js, node.js, MongoDB

I've been spending a lot of my personal development time looking into JavaScript frameworks.

It's amazing how much the language has grown up.  I still remember doing Web Development in college (back in 1998) for University websites and using JavaScript for client-side form validation.

You know, the tacky alert pop-ups that you hit the user with, one after another, when he/she has not filled in all the fields of an HTML form.  Ugh.

Well, given the long and sordid history of JavaScript, I have been amazed at how it has grown and evolved (AJAX, Prototype, jQuery, Backbone), and recently learned that people are doing server-side development in JavaScript on Node.js.

I will admit, I was a bit skeptical about Node.js when I first heard about it.  My first thought was "that cannot be performant", thinking again back to client-side scripting.

However, as I read more and more about Node.js, I began to think "This isn't your father's JavaScript."  What I did not realize initially was that Node.js runs on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, which is written in C++.

I'm digging into it and thinking about building a Web Application using a combination of:

Bootstrap + Backbone (front end) -> Node.js -> Mongoose (OR/M) -> MongoDB (Database).