> I truly believe there is a big demand for a Node.js framework to facilitate this.

How do you feel about derby? (http://github.com/codeparty/derby)

First time I see this, looks extremely promising. Thanks for the link!

What are some of the frameworks you've seen? I've been looking for frameworks that allow client-side javascript routing to be reused on the server. So far I've found two, both using a combination of backbone.js and jsdom to render pages on the server:

https://github.com/Morriz/backbone-everywhere https://github.com/developmentseed/bones

Rendering arbitrarily on either the client or server is hard. Other solutions that I saw forced the developer to have to think about it, so I developed FaxJs which allows the system to handle that complexity for you.

https://github.com/jordow/FaxJs

The gist is that you just write standard declarative ui structures in pure javascript and the system disassembles the markup on the server, and reassembles it on the client with all the events still in tact. You wouldn't know all that is happening just by looking, though.

    ...
    var twoDivs = {
      className: 'outerDiv',
      onClick: this.outerDivClicked,
      innerDiv: {
        className: 'innerDiv',
        content: 'inner-most-div!'
      }.Div()
    }.Div();

Or you can just do it all on the client too, if that's your thing. You'll need to work to get this integrated into your routing technology as with any rendering system.

Try this combo: Express(server routing), Sammy(client routing), Jsdom, Jsviews(templates).

ASP.NET MVC does a really nice job. I have a pattern that detects whether the request is for JSON or HTML (via a GET or POST parameter) and return a user control (module or what have you) or the entire page respectively.

I'm mostly on the same page as you, trying to somehow integrate Backbone on the server side. In the end, the mess I was creating became really unmaintainable and I left the project on hold.

I am doing async on even the initial requests. If you land somewhere 'within' the site the path will be passed from the backend router to the javascript router and then triggered on the client side.

the decision to be made there is do you want to load all the objects (models, views etc.) or have an init where it is all either loaded async or from the localstore cache. I went with the later so that the html page can be static cached.

this has taken me a while because there was a lot of js to write - for eg. a sync replacement that uses localCache and the server smartly, that responds in async with 'ok' so the view can be updated rather than waiting on the server, and then triggering server updates every x seconds or when the user closes the window (this all has to be cross-browser, which is the hardest part)

a node.js framework that does all this would be great, while I am using Python atm I think these types of apps are very well suited to run on node.

TBH there's no reason it needs to be node, you just need to use a template that could work on both client and server.

Not that I know of any yet.

Mustache (http://mustache.github.com/) has implementations in 20+ languages including javascript. The templates themselves are entirely declarative - any logic is contained within a separate object.

If you don't need any custom logic at all, you can easily use JSON to pass that object between client and server with no further changes. If you do need some custom logic, it'd be slightly more work, but then again you could just opt to use javascript for any small pieces of logic, as there are V8 and/or Spidermonkey wrappers for most or all of the languages supported by Mustache.

Jade (very HAML/Slim-like) can do both client- and server-side rendering, and it can also precompile your template into pure JavaScript so users don't need to download a bulky template engine for it to work.

Zappa with CoffeeKup can do server and client template sharing. Or jsdom and jsviews if you find Zappa too fancy.