simonista

I'm a web developer and I've been working in rails for the past year or so. I've been following the development of the javascript ecosystem out of the corner of my eye, but I don't feel like I've truly grasped how all the pieces work together yet.

My question to you all is this: What are the tools and packages that are used in this new workflow? How does the data flow? What packages and code are the most important pieces of this ecosystem and how are they plugged together in different ways?

I realize that lots of people are using javascript in different ways, and I'm interested in hearing about both backend systems (build on node.js?) to frontend UI (jquery?). So maybe another way to phrase the question is: If you were building an end-to-end javascript web application, what tools and packages would you use, and where are the modular boundaries that could be replaced by other technologies?

Thanks in advance!