There are some nice new tools emerging to solve this problem, but don't force front end devs into an entirely new platform. One of my projects is an open source server (https://github.com/deployd/deployd) that's totally un-opinionated on the front end, but makes it really easy to add robust backends to client apps.
What I'm saying is that a tool for webdev that wants to stand any chance of becoming popular must be able say to developers: here's the familiar MVC structure, you write your models, you create your views (hopefully out of set of widgets that are highly replaceable/customizable at any moment), we take care of talking to the server, saving your models to the storage and syncing between different instances of an app. Sure, there are problems to solve here, but since everybody does it their own way at the moment, I don't see no reason why we can't have a framework that solves them for you.
Is it open source? If so, I'd love to check it out. We've been working on an open source server for JavaScript developers, that has some of the modularity of Wordpress: https://github.com/deployd/deployd
Yes, everything is MIT (that I wrote). Deployd is really awesome, congratulations. I agree that having an easy way to do what looks like direct database manipulations from the browser is really useful and it seems like the rules and stuff you have set up to secure that is a very good approach. I also think that mongodb makes a lot of sense because of its flexibility and ease of use.
My thing really isn't ready to show anyone but its at https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog at the moment. I have a bunch of stuff to do including most everything related to security. I think at first I am going to try to cheat with really simple rules possibly inserted into the everything.now function call if I can, or something. Really a lot of stuff to work out.
