Cloudcraft

Gulp is used as the build system for Cloudcraft.co with a lot of custom targets: vendoring dependencies, transpiling ES2015 to Ecmascript5 (with Babel), incremental compilation of multiple watched modules, minification, creation of app distribution packages etc. Having previously used Grunt, I've come to greatly prefer Gulp due to the ability to easily write my own tasks using plain JS without necessarily relying on plugins for everything. gulp

Babel is awesome! 100% of the code for Cloudcraft.co is transpiled from ES2015 (even some ES7 extensions, like decorators and class properties!), using Gulp+Browserify for the frontend and on-the-fly translation in the Node.js backend. Babel allows us to use all the features of future JS, today, giving us a efficient and clean codebase. Overall, it has been an exceptionally smooth adoption, everything Just Works(tm), including debugging with source maps, etc. Babel

Express.js is the workhorse of the Cloudcraft.co backend. It's not the most exciting part of a stack, but it works, is very well documented, and you can find a plugin for almost everything you could possibly want. We also carefully evaluated Koa.js, but decided not to go down this route: fewer plugins, less documentation & answers online. I'm also not personally convinced by the generators yield syntax at all. ES7 async functions looks like a much better bet, and with Promises and Babel I can have that already today. ExpressJS

WebStorm is the best IDE hands-down for JavaScript developers. Yes, there's more lightweight editors (and nothing beats vim when debugging remotely), but the sheer productivity of WebStorm is unparalleled. React/JSX support? Check. ES2015 support? You bet. Node.js profiling? Yes! Look, if you can't rename a class or variable reliably across a JavaScript project, follow references, debug (without console logs) your editor sucks. Don't use a editor that sucks, use WebStorm! WebStorm