We recommend frameworks likeRuby on Railsbecause they allow a developer to get busy writing the most complex portions of their job: the business logic.

This is in contrast to writing what we call "the plumbing," which ties all the pieces together and makes that login form talk to that OAuth provider which then lets you go to that Web Form that records...

That is opposed to writing the User model that, upon login, sends a notification to all their friends' devices, for instance.

Here are our absolute musts when choosing a framework and API programming language:

1. Strong open source community
2. Online repositories to discover new libraries
3. Must have well-supported tools for authentication, deployments, error tracking, GPS manipulation, etc.
4. Must have an ORM (object-relational mapping - an abstraction for working with a database)
5. Must be in a language that the majority of the dev team likes (this is probably the most important if you ask a developer)

Ruby on Rails has continued to meet all of these criteria for us, but Django and Node.js are very popular platforms to develop for and are well-supported within their communities.