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I challenge you to build some non-toy API with Node.JS and then try the same thing in Rails.

Express is decent enough, but it's barely an equal to Merb.

Challenge accepted: we have an API up and running at tldr.io :) We don't have a gazillion hits everyday for sure, and it may not be as complex as Twitter but: - It works perfectly - It really wasn't that difficult to build

The second half of that challenge is to compare to how hard it would've been in Rails.

I can also answer that as I've a fair bit of Rails experience. This time, we built our API using nodejs/expressjs for the first time, so we had to learn it plus the ins and outs of handling user login, sessions, CORS and a lot of small things Rails does for you. So we wouls probably have been faster with Rails.

If we need to build another product from scratch again though, we'll definitely be faster with nodejs. I understand that nodejs programming seems strange/hard to do in a non-spagetthi way to some people, but really, after a few months it is not hard.

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