My preferred Node.js application setup:

• Mimosa: munges the javascripts together, runs Hapi.
• Hapi: clean Node.js Web application framework.
• AngularJS: Client-side Model-View-Whatever (MVW) framework.
  • Angular UI Router
  • Angular UI Bootstrap
• Browserify: CommonJS-style imports for the client.
• Bootstrap: CSS for developers who don't do CSS.
  • Font Awesome

Live reload works, but you will need to use the Chrome extension.

Unfortunately, testing is a real mess right now largely due to incompatibilities between Karma and Browserify. The current version of the karma-browserify project uses an older version of the Browserify library. There's a known issue regarding the way karam-browserify uses an old feature of Browserify that breaks the test harness. I also suspect the use of aliases is also not supported (discovered during my initial experimentation). When I get some time, I'm going to try to dig into both frameworks to see if I can find a work around.