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In researching technologies for development of a single-page web application (SPA) for mobile deployment, I am trying to determine a good backend web application framework to use.

I like the idea of using a NoSQL DB with a clean REST/JSON API and plan to use an client-side MVC framework like backbone.js or angular.js. I've looked into BAAS services such as Parse.com to use as the datastore. I like some of the services they provide - like user management.

But my hangup with the BAAS offerings is that I don't think they'd be good for backend code to support serious applications. For example, I envision a need for batch jobs to handle reporting, data cleanup & maintenance, special processing to compute statistics for time sensitive data, etc. (Essentially computationally intensive or bandwidth-intensive operations on data that would not be appropriate to perform directly from a mobile device).

Some BAAS services like Parse.com do provide "cloud code" for server-side processing, but I fear that the meter would be running for any serious jobs. And Parse.com limits batch jobs as a function of the number of billed API transactions. I'm not sure I want to plan my background jobs based on my front-end transactions.

So it seems that a more open (i.e. non-BAAS) web application framework that provides NoSQL and a good REST/JSON API would be a good way to go - as long as you also have the ability to write some serious server-side programs for background batch processing. Most of the traditional ones like Django would provide that - but they seem to provide the MVC capabilities from the server-side and don't seem to be designed with SPAs in mind.

I think what I want is a "MEAN" stack (http://blog.mongodb.org/post/49262866911/the-mean-stack-mongodb-expressjs-angularjs-and), but with proven server-side processing capabilities and some boilerplate functionality available via the REST/JSON API (analogous to the user management functions in the Parse.com API).

I could be talking through my hat about all of this, and my question probably does more to reveal my ignorance about the technologies I've mentioned than anything else. Nevertheless, any insight you have on the matter will be appreciated.
Posted
Updated 3-Sep-14 21:53pm
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