I have written a few apps in ExpressJS and one of the things that I found annoying at first was how minimal and unstructured it was. I found a way of doing things in an organized manner that I like, so it has become easy to get things in my own structure. Perhaps that is the charm of Express, it gives you freedom to structure (or not) in the way you desire.
RailwayJS seems to provide a common structure to be used with Express. It does provide a lot, and a part of me feels that it provides too much. But you can always choose which parts to make use in your application.
I'm on the fence about if I would recommend it to a new Express user or not though.
Yeah, Express is deliberately minimal. In addition to frameworks like Railway there are a number of helper modules, like express-resource, that build on Express it as well. Express is good for new users as it's minimal enough that it forces them to get the lay of the land, but its Connect underpinnings remove some of the sharp edges of just using Node's http module.
Marketing mishap I'd guess. The tag line threw me off as well, "create NodeJS web apps faster with more energy, using RailwayJS". I don't like the idea of having to exert more energy. Or maybe they mean my app will have more energy.
I'm author of this framework
Headline says "RightwayJS" because I need to choose some other name to framework (other than RailwayJS), but I'm still thinking about possible names. Rightway is on of.
The big missing piece in Node is decent data mapping. Juggling looks like a good start and I'm glad the developer's separated it from the Rails project.
That and decent documentation. Just providing one or two super-specific, inconsistent examples[0], with bugger all explanation, and leaving the rest in an API doc that's impossible to get any decent use of[1] isn't really enough. And Jade deserves a special mention for its pointless front page [2].
I really like the API of http://selectjs.com by Alex from DailyJS, as well as the fact that it separates accessing the database from defining the schema. The latter is not needed for NoSQL databases. A small package for defining schemas for relational databases would be a nice addition though.
RailwayJS seems to provide a common structure to be used with Express. It does provide a lot, and a part of me feels that it provides too much. But you can always choose which parts to make use in your application.
I'm on the fence about if I would recommend it to a new Express user or not though.