I spent some time at "TodoMVC.com" going over the tools they have there. Then I spent some time trying to figure out which of those I wanted to use. After a few weeks of struggling to decide, and not being able to, I decided to not use any of them.<p>I can see why those would be a reasonable choice when a team is working on a project, but it's just me working on my stuff and all of those tools require a pretty huge investment, and once you're using one you're vested in it and there's no turning back without a significant loss.<p>I've never been a fan of using SQL DBs for web apps. I'm sure they're great for some apps and if you're well versed is using those it's probably the tool to use, but I wasn't.<p>So I decided to use what was familiar and easy for me. I use jQuery, Bootstrap, mustache.js, accounting.js. For the DB I started with PouchDB.js, and added Apache's CouchDB and web server running on DigitalOcean VPS when I was ready to move the app to the web.<p>With this approach I can start off without using any web server or DB at all, or using my Mac's built-in web server and CouchDB installed on my Mac.<p>And when you move to a web server you can use one that's much smaller. I added a service worker to my app so it stores the app on the client side. Since the app resides and is running almost entirely on the client side the server can handle many more users and you can use a much less costly server with no degradation of performance.<p>I have a demo with some pre-loaded data you can check out at <a href="https://cherrypc.com/app/demo.html" rel="nofollow">https://cherrypc.com/app/demo.html</a>, and a free version of the app at <a href="https://cherrypc.com/app/web.html" rel="nofollow">https://cherrypc.com/app/web.html</a>. Both of those use your web browser's built-in IndexedDB and run entirely on the client side.<p>The main point is, for me, these tools were so much easier to get going with than those frameworks and I spent quite a bit of time working with those to find that out. PouchDB.js is, in my opinion, one of the best and most overlooked JS tools we have right now. And CouchDB is right there with it. No other DB makes it so easy to implement Offline-First, Local-First design goals.