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Comment by chuckdries | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised nobody is talking about Express for the back end. Maybe it's because I hail from the front end world, but I'm already so comfortable in javascript I'm faster in it than if I had to learn anything else.

For the front end, I like Vue because it's just react with less boilerplate.

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It blows my mind that there still isn't a polished ORM for the node.js / Express ecosystem.

Precisely this. I came from the Django world to try starting a Node.js project, and was absolutely blown away by how immature ORMs and even database libraries felt. In Python, you have SQLalchemy and Django ORM, both of which are fantastic and make ample use of the language. But for JavaScript, it felt like an uphill battle, especially if you want to do anything fancy.

Of course you don't _need_ an ORM or at least you definitely don't need one as full-blown as Django ORM. But I didn't even feel comfortable using any of the solutions I saw that were supposedly the 'best.' And yet, when I went and evaluated the solutions, I do agree they were the best - I just never felt like they were mature enough to really use yet. As far as not using an ORM goes, certainly this is doable, but at the end of the day if you don't want to hardcode a bunch of SQL queries and statements you probably are going to need to write code that will begin to look awfully like ORM code for basic operations...

Most Python libraries are a lot more mature than NodeJS libraries. This makes sense because they are also often a lot older. That being said, all ecosystems have their up- and downsides. Fpr example, I think package management for NodeJS is infinite amount of times better than for Python. Pipenv only came around one year or so ago.

Datastore Agnostic:

- JS-Data - https://github.com/js-data/js-data

SQL:

- Sequelize - https://github.com/sequelize/sequelize

- Bookshelf - https://github.com/bookshelf/bookshelf

- Objection - https://github.com/Vincit/objection.js

- TypeORM - https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm

NoSQL:

- Mongoose - https://github.com/Automattic/mongoose

- Thinky - https://github.com/neumino/thinky

All those listed in the SQL category (the category almost everyone actually cares about) are total crap compared to, for example, ActiveRecord. GP said polished not plentiful.

Have personal experience with Sequelize and TypeORM, both are very far from being polished and finished.

Yeah, well, what else did the romans ever do for us?

Aqueducts?

> ORM for the node.js / Express ecosystem

Coming from Python world, it's probably for the best that nobody is using ORMs.

Can you expand on your logic here? Is this because Python ORMs have gotten too bloated?

They are bloated and they are not performant. If you are using Node and the main benefit of node is its asynchronous execution flow you would be shooting yourself in the foot by using an ORM and gaining all the overhead that comes from serialization and deserialization.

Your comment reeks of inexperience.

Haha, your comment reeks of inexperience. The thing you have namely not experienced is the pain of having to port an entire service to a different language because SQLAlchemy is as slow as a snail.

But yes, keep on using your ORMs because using a query builder is too hard. I'm sure your significant experience building services that will at most ever handle 2 QPS is very important to the software engineering world.

For what it's worth, if SQLAlchemy (or any other ORM) is slow, it's probably not because of "serialization" and "deserialization" (of whatever you had in mind), but because the database is queried in a (really, really) inefficient way.

It's also unclear how that's related to whether you're working in an async environment or not.

He was probably thinking about stuff like that.

One of the biggest bottlenecks for us was creating these massive nested Python objects.

Typeorm has been fantastic for me: https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm

It strikes just the right balance between the data modeling approach and query building for me.

Have a look at http://loopback.io Express with scaffolding and connectors to memory, MongoDb, MySql, MsSql and other.

Maybe check out the one we built in the Qbix Platform. It does tons of stuff including sharding and autogenerating model code for you:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/master/platform/classe...

There are multiple. Sequelize is the best and I've used it in a few projects

Everyone complains about ActiveRecord, but other ecosystems often have far worse options to choose from than AR and Sequel.

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