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1: Which technologies are popular and what do people like about them? (To help someone deciding between). Seems like React frontend, or perhaps Vue? and Node being the popular backend?
2: Is there a site that keeps track of the various options for frontend and backend frameworks and how their popularity progresses?
I would say mithril.js for the frontend and Flask for the backend is pretty good, but that's just my favorites. There are plenty of other good ones, and neither of those are particularly popular.
If you're really unpatient, I'll click on the first link for you[0]...which reveals the popular frameworks. This is based on real data since it's a survey, not just one or two comments on HN.
If you're building simple CRUD apps for a business audience both Rails and Spring Boot would be good choices for instance.
In terms of front-end development I'd suggest vanilla JavaScript and HTML5. Keep things simple. A basic web app doesn't need any complex framework.
That said Angular, React.js and Vue.js are equally valid choices for building complex applications but each of them is way beyond a 'basic web app' scope in my opinion.
For backend, I prefer Play + Scala over Ruby/Python because of the static typing.
http://stateofjs.com/ If you're really unpatient, I'll click on the first link for you[0]...which reveals the popular frameworks. This is based on real data since it's a survey, not just one or two comments on HN. [0] http://stateofjs.com/2016/introduction/
If not, I would still go with Rails. Its massively productive, batteries included... and forces you to learn some practices that you can later take to other frameworks (migrations, asset pipeline, etc).
I dont know of any other framework that forces you to adopt these. On HN, you will find a lot of rhetoric against that - which may be true for experienced programmers.
But for sheer productivity from someone new to all this... Rails really cannot be beaten.
In the JS world, you will spend atleast a couple of days figuring out Requirejs vs AMD vs commonjs vs webpack vs browserify vs npm vs yarn.
I'm not so sure if it is worth it...unless learning JS frameworks was your goal all along.