Once upon a time, the little JavaScript plugins that make sites work and pop—everything from the helper functions you never notice to text that appears as if typed on a typewriter—were a pain to put on a site. Let’s call this age pre-Node.js.

In the pre-Node age, developers needed to download each plugin from its creator and add it to a site individually. In the end, dozens of JavaScript files could be left floating in the code.

Node.js makes code smart. Rather than stitching together each individual plugin, we now select plugins from Node’s library and use its package manager to install only what we need. This consolidates our code and gets all of our JavaScript into one file. 

Ruby on Rails, a server-side web application framework, has been a long-standing staple in the development community. We use it primarily because WordPress is PHP-based, and we use PHP as a server-side framework. Rails, as it’s commonly called, offers a robust selection of tried and tested features, as well as tools for designing the foundations for API-based app development.