If we don't rely on a PHP back-end, let's go for Django. For easy JS manipulation of .svg files, we should try and see if raphael.js suits our needs.

List of (front-end) JS frameworks to consider

• AngularJS, offered by @Ash-Crow
• Backbone.js and Ember.js noted as the main alternative to this one
• React.js from Facebook to explore

Python drawback

Several handy tools like GulpJS are mainly optimized for full JS webstack. So, using a Django server, we'll lose a little bit of comfort configuring these tools.

About the browser stack, two questions (more or less related)

• Does a framework bring a lot comparing to vanilla javascript for the use ?
• Which browser we intend to support. A good target would be in my opinion Grade A support by mediawiki

Note: I'm only going to speak about the front-end, as the fact we code the back-end in Node.js or in Python doesn't matter a lot to this question.

Frameworks like ReactJS offers to build all the front-end as one application, without duplicating all the HTML/JS code.

That means you don't write anymore in 3 languages (Python for the controller part, HTML for the views, JS for the code to run on client) but only one: JS. So DOM elements are not put in HTML, but instancied by JS.

In React, a web application is a set of components, with properties (immutable constants) and state (mutable variables). Like in GUI programming a component could be a widget (e.g. a textarea) or a set of other widgets. You write a method how to render the widget from a given state and app code only changes state, rendering will be called implicitly.

They offer great introspection, and we actually can debug it in browser console (my browsers tend to have debuggers components for React and Ember for example). If you manipulate the DOM with Plain JS or jQuery, you only have the initial or final DOM browser representation to inspect, not the natural objects you manipulate.

You can scroll https://facebook.github.io/react/index.html for an example of what it brings.

Finally, they play nice with unit testing: See for example http://facebook.github.io/jest/docs/tutorial-react.html#content.

As a rich JS application, targets browsers would then be the same kind able to run Visual Editor, anything recent, but not IE6, IE7 or links (IE8 is supported by React by the way). That makes sense, especially as we have a CLI application to offer, nina, to those liking to work on the console.