New stack, full stack.

In the past month I've been busy rebuilding the LightApp stack from scratch.
LightApp is a very cool startup in the industrial energy management field.
The product's essence is collecting data from various sources (Sensors, meters, production databases) of huge factories and analysing it to find ways to improve their effectiveness and reduce their costs and carbon footprint.
Previous product was built over LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/PHP/MySql), using the webii PHP framework, and had a lot of limitations - One example was heavy relying on SQL to perform statistical analysis, which was costly and shown poor performance and response time.

We've decided to rebuild the client (Not the database) with node.js, and after less than a month (We're a team of two) we've managed to almost completely finish our rewrite.
For UI we've decided to use bootstrap and amcharts, and manage the data ourselves (Rather than use a framework like angular or backbone).
Over the server side, express was used for main routing, mysql for database connection, and nunjucks for server side HTML.

The application doesn't have too many end users (Expecting few hundreds during 2014), but each user is performing heavy statistical analysis operations (Like a distribution of hourly data per category over a period of 6 months) - Which should be done really fast, and it is. Querying large data sets and crunching them in node is amazingly fast, but in the near future we will move our data to mongo, which can perform this analysis even faster.

Developing the whole stack in Javascript is fun - Though the language has a lot of limitations, it's fun to use, easy to debug and test, and, for our use, proves to be cost effective. Node.js asynchronous programming mode takes some time getting used to, but if you've dealt with AJAX on the client side, you'll be quite familiar with it.

I would highly recommend every programmer to try writing a full stack JS application. It's amazing how Javascript has evolved in the recent years.