I’m building a content driven image website that I’d like to have social networking aspects (The ability to add friends, an activity feed of your friends, ect…)
I was wondering if there was any framework for someone who is looking to use Javascript, with Node.js, and JSON, as opposed to the more traditional PHP and SQL? Does such a thing exist?
Or perhaps for someone less experienced, it would be better to just use this?
Express is the go to for a lot of NodeJS projects, it’s battle tested, stable, and has the biggest community. A lot of other NodeJS frameworks are actually built on top of Express. (Sails, MEAN, Kraken, etc)
koa uses more modern ideas, but you might run into issues if you don’t know ES6 really well. Hapi is also fairly popular, but it is more configuration based than convention.
You might run into “MEAN”, that’s just a buzzword, don’t worry about it and don’t get caught up on it. You don’t need to use Mongo, or Express, or Angular, with NodeJS. You can use MySQL, Hapi, React, with NodeJS if you want or mix and match with any other combination you want.
Thanks a bunch. 
This has definitely given me a few places to start looking. I know this seems a little ambitious, but I’m serious about learning. Do you have any recommendations for books or tutorials that could walk me through the general process of making a basic social network website with one or more of these tools? I’m normally a front end developer/UI designer so this is a bit of a venture into the wild blue for me.
(And yes, I’ve heard the whole MEAN thing. It seems like a popular toolset.)
I don’t know of any that build a social network, but FreeCodeCamp has quite a bit on both the Front and Backend, as well as messing with MongoDB.
There are lots of other tutorials out there, lots of the MEAN stack, just look for something fairly recent that uses Node v4+. Once you understand the pieces and how stuff is put together, then you can start building it yourself.
It’s fine to use it and there are a lot of “MEAN Stack” tutorials that are geared towards all skill levels. I just see a lot people getting caught up on “using MEAN” and not separating the parts.
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