Interested in what people who are doing medium to large-ish Angular apps are using on their server side? I'm about to embark on a medium sized project and making the it seems like using Rails or Django (the two frameworks I'm most familiar with) are a bit of an overkill given I don't actually need all the routing/templating/viewing gumph that is built in. What do you find is working well for you?
I use Scala, Play, Postgres for backend API. I started with checking Flask and learning Rails, but then I just switched back to the stack I am comfortable with as I don't want to learn both new backend and frontend (Angular.js) stuff on the project and focus on delivering. Frontend and backend code are kept separately for now and I use Yeomen for assisting frontend development and it works fine.<p>If you go with Rails you can strip it down and check <a href="http://api.rubyonrails.org/" rel="nofollow">http://api.rubyonrails.org/</a> for APIs.
There's similar project for APIs in Django.
I'm using Sinatra - little overhead, simple code.
I used node.js/express.js in the past, but the callback hell made me dislike it a bit, although admittedly I'm not experienced with node, so there might be a way to avoid that.<p>I had a look at Firebase and my main problem with it is having to rely on 3rd party service and storing data on their servers + portability if I was to decide to leave them in the future.
NodeJS + Express.<p>I've had some good mileage out of SailsJS ( <a href="http://sailsjs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sailsjs.com/</a> ) recently, essentially it is a NodeJS + Express stack with Socket.io and prebuilt ORM/blueprints. Up and running in a matter of minutes and behind the scenes it is still just NodeJS/Express
I use Django and Tastypie. If you don't need Django's routing, templating, views, etc. then don't use them! Code that is never run doesn't cost you anything.<p>Tastypie lets you build APIs quickly, and the Django admin lets you browse your data without having to write any code at all. For the kinds of apps I build, things can't get easier than this. YMMV, of course.