Echo JS 0.11.0

Node.js was a pretty uphill battle for several years in some organizations.  My first corp deployment of node was literally because I was playing with it, and researching a few things, and was able to get an API written and deployed for something in a couple of hours, when another dev quoted a week for a .Net project.  LOL... A mongodb a synchronization project, and an API node project all written/deployed in under a day, and ran on a "backup" server used for job processes, reverse proxied from the main server (Application Request Routing, ARR under IIS).

I spent the next couple years about half node, half C#... and the past couple years mostly node.  I actually prefer it for most things.  But it's not like it was an easy sell early on at all for me.

Nice story :)

Node was always nice to quickly show off something. I remember playing around with Node, the first time, in the end of 2009. Back then it already was clear that it will probably become huge.

I think that's often how new tech slowly sneaks itself into a company. Some developers playing around with it, talking about it at lunch, demonstrating that it is way more productiv than the previous solution. Then the technology gets used in some minor important project, after that maybe in some more important project, and so on.
Couple of years later, same thing happens with some newer technology.

I would be more than happy to admit those cases have been as successful as jQuery, but in reality I could separately discuss about each of them and why they don't quite fit the case. But since this is Echo JS let's limit about JS stuff.

Backbone has never got nearly to be a "major" library, nothing like jQuery, or Angular, or React. It had some traction back in 2012 or something, but has never been a global success, Ashkenas notwithstanding (his work with CoffeeScript and Underscore didn't go unnoticed - speaking of which, you could've mentioned Underscore indeed).

Node.js struggled at first. A lot. It was more of a curiosity than a real contender of classic LAMP stacks. Even now, a lot of "heavy" core business logic is done in Java or C#, while Node isn't even considered for the task. Because for those languages there are a lot of libraries and frameworks that got the contribution of behemoths like Sun, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Google... "Serious" companies that anyway granted serious commitments to the ecosystem.

It hasn't really happened for Node, not yet, even though such companies are investing quite a bit in it now. But it happened thanks to the major reorganization that happened in the community after the io.js schism, which eventually led to a solid board with a consistent governance, LTS versions, update plans, roadmaps and so on. Now this is something that "serious" companies could rely on. But it's still quite novel, and in fact Node hasn't really replaced LAMP stacks yet... only in those parts that are somewhat considered "replaceable".

And express... is in that position because it has no real contenders, really. Alternatives like Hapi, Koa... aren't really different and they're not backed by big companies either. And unless something completely new comes into the field, this isn't going to change, because... express is now an IBM thing, since Big Blue aquired StrongLoop a while ago.

Meanwhile, frameworks from big companies continue to blow away competition. Like Bootstrap dwarves Foundation, or like Jest is quickly demolishing the lead of the classic Mocha-Chai-Sinon stack for testing.

The morale is always the same: if you want your project to survive against similar from big companies, you need a *really solid* community around it first.

The libraries/projects I mentioned were only those which quickly came to my mind. Probably we would need to inspect a larger dataset in order to get meaningful results on the topic.

IMHO the reason why alot of single person projects gain traction at all is because they tend to have nice APIs. APIs which developers enjoy using. This is because those single persons have a clear picture in their head about how their library should work.
That's also why TJ has so many popular projects (in my opinion). It's because he does a great job designing the APIs. Funny thing is that he is also an actual designer :)