From looking at the documentation of RailwayJS/Express On Railway it seems like an elaborate NodeJS web–framework to me. It is built on top of ExpressJS, offers nice generators and scaffolding and has CoffeeScript support built right in. Does anyone have experience with this framework and would say that it is a true alternative to Ruby On Rails, Django or the like as Express is to Sinatra?

From looking at the documentation of RailwayJS/Express On Railway it seems like an elaborate NodeJS web–framework to me. It is built on top of ExpressJS, offers nice generators and scaffolding and has CoffeeScript support built right in. Does anyone have experience with this framework and would say that it is a true alternative to Ruby On Rails, Django or the like as Express is to Sinatra?

• javascript
• ruby-on-rails
• node.js
• coffeescript

• 1 didn't know, seems really nice. +1 for sharing – apneadiving Commented Aug 28, 2011 at 20:59
• 1 Why would you want to :\ You don't need anything but express. The rest is bloat and forcing your into a box. – Raynos Commented Aug 29, 2011 at 1:04
• 2 "Generators and scaffolding" are the least significant feature that Rails offers. If "generators and scaffolding" are the sum total of the similarity, then there is no similarity worth mentioning. (There may be a great similarity - if so, it's not because of "generators and scaffolding".) – yfeldblum Commented Aug 29, 2011 at 1:12
• 1 @Raynos: isn't that what opinionated software is about? – treppo Commented Aug 29, 2011 at 11:11
• @Justice: of course, I just said, it has nice generators and scaffolding built in, but that is not the reason for RailwayJS to be an alternative to Rails—right. – treppo Commented Aug 29, 2011 at 11:11

2 Answers 2

As author of this project (railwayjs) I could tell you: sure, it's cool, use it, share it with colleagues, fork repo, and improve it. But as developer, how use this tool every day, I say to you: this is very young toolkit (less than 1 year old), it still needs more love than just use-out-of-box, as RoR, I not recommend to use it in production, if you are do not completely understand what happens in the app code.

So, if you want to have RoR replacement in nodejs in future - use it, and report about issues. It motivates me to make this project better.

Thanks for posting.

I don't know if the asynchronous nature of the Node environment will ever be quite as elegant as Ruby for Rails-like applications.

I say stick to what you're good at. At least until Node supports something like the Actor model to help with callback hell.