If you're familiar with Ruby on Rails and are using MongoDB to build a NodeJS app, you might miss some slick ActiveRecord features, such as declarative validation. Diving into most of the basic tutorials out there, you'll find that many basic web development tasks are more work than you like. For example, if we borrow the style of http://howtonode.org/express-mongodb, a route that pulls a document by its ID will look something like this:

If you've ever tried to build any kind of website, odds are you've had to create some way of validating and saving input from a form. Back in the bad old days this used to be a huge pain, because there were no good frameworks to help get the job done right. The three primary pain points that you have to deal with when trying to validate a form without the aid of a framework are:

This post was featured as a guest blog post for MongoDB on April 30th 2013, which can be found here