I'm very much looking forward to (and hoping to help build) thick-client frameworks with the same level of polish and maturity as Rails 3. Obviously there's a long way to go, but I think it will happen.
I'm not a Node expert, but I'd be willing to bet we end up with at least one Node framework at the head of the pack, if for no other reason than it enables easy sharing between server and client-side logic. (E.g. write your validation rules only once.)
You could of course write the backend in any language, and you could even have some code sharing if you automatically generated JavaScript from your backend language. (E.g. ClojureScript.) But I'm attracted to the simplicity of just using JS, and not having to worry about all the weird little things that can happen when you compile one high-level language to another.
at least one Node framework at the head of the pack, if for no other reason than it enables easy sharing between server and client-side logic
I'm surprised this still hasn't been seriously tackled. The major node frameworks (namely express) all seem to follow the old-fashioned rails-model which seems like an anachronism on that particular platform.
Our Bones[1] library for node.js does this, in most applications we have written probably in excess of 90% of the code is shared between server and client.
We have written cloud based hosting systems[2], desktop applications[3] and more standard web applications with it. I think it wouldn't be too hard to make it possible to build phonegap'esque apps with it too.
It's pretty great stuff, but it opens you up to very new and interesting problems due to the environment being so different. The client side has absolutely no concept of a 'request', and there is a lot of stuff that just can't be done on the client (is this email address unique?). The server side does not have the long running state that the client does, which causes another category of problems.
I think it's going to become a more dominant approach, because it's just so damn convenient, but it's going to take a bit more time to properly 'crack' it.
I'm not a Node expert, but I'd be willing to bet we end up with at least one Node framework at the head of the pack, if for no other reason than it enables easy sharing between server and client-side logic. (E.g. write your validation rules only once.)
You could of course write the backend in any language, and you could even have some code sharing if you automatically generated JavaScript from your backend language. (E.g. ClojureScript.) But I'm attracted to the simplicity of just using JS, and not having to worry about all the weird little things that can happen when you compile one high-level language to another.