Web Development: A Crazy World

Chinese and western dude learns guitar. The Chinese player will worry about the scales, the hammer on/off drills, chord drills, picking drills, and maybe practice a song and focus on technicalities; western dude would pick a guitar, learn a few chords to play a song, realise that to play more songs he/she must practice hammer ons, etc, but everything is so that he can play more songs. They have never had to worry about drills. It's a means to an end.

Web frameworks are just drills to choose from. Pick the one you need and move on. With experience, you'll be able to tell what is good and what is not.

Why worry about which framework is "best"? It doesn't matter. If WP template and jquery solves the problem then why is he even talking about Haskell?

Imagine is Adobe, Oracle or MS had won the Flash/Flex, Java or ActiveX battles, where would we have been today?

As much as I use Chrome (and love it), I can't help but admire the work done by Mozilla to rescue the Netscape codebase and mould it into Firefox. I think they deserve a lot of the accolades that enables this zany ecosystem to thrive.

What matters these days is probably how well you and your team already know the technology, how good the documentation is, community size/takeup, how quick the devs are to respond to issues, and how mature and stable the API is from release to release. How popular/old the technology is also counts for more if you're looking to hire people with experience in it.

MVC on the client is becoming more and more important, once you start slapping a lot of js on a page it can quickly become un-maintainable. We went with Backbone as Ember was changing too quickly in backwards-incompatible ways.

MVC on the server (Django/Rails/Express/whatever) still has a place - you want something serving restful data / html skeletons and mapping urls to responses. In my day job that's Spring MVC because that's what people here know and it ain't broke.

Frontend language choice: Learning JS seems to be the natural choice here. Things that compile to JS e.g. CoffeeScript or DART might also work for you; I don't have experience with them but I'd imagine debugging problems in the resulting js would be a pain until browsers support them natively.