Use Node.js and ExtJS to build an enterprise-grade grid-based single page application?

Question

While the title suggests I wanted to cram as many buzzwords into the question as possible, I am actually serious ;)

I am exploring my options for building an enterprise application that will have plenty of grids and needs to be as snappy as a desktop app. While operational transformation is going to be a big issue (or rather concurrent edits, with OT a possible approach to solving related problems), the app is unlikely to ever have a large number of concurrent users (starting with 50, probably never more than a couple of hundred).

While SmartGWT seems to solve many of the problems we are facing, the team building the app is very small (probably two devs and a technical program manager). Node.js seems attractive because both devs could work on backend and frontend.

In this context I have a couple of questions:

Is Node.js suitable for this kind of app? It would be very interesting to hear from people and their experiences with Node.js and this kind of app.

Has anyone used it together with ExtJS/SmartGWT? What were your experiences with how these work together with Node?

I am pretty sure it will be impossible to find experienced Node.js devs while finding Java experts is a comparably trivial exercise. Experience with which other languages make the transition to Node.js easy?

I know this is a rather broad question, please bear with me.

Answer 1

Usually this is solved using: node.js+socket.io+backbone.js

But you should really look up: http://meteor.com/ and http://www.firebase.com/