tl;dr - use Node.js-Browser-App on github to quickly get started making a React based web application built with Node.js
Lately I've been doing a lot of work constructing javascript-based applications that are meant to run in a browser. In some cases an application was meant to be used in a web browser and in other cases as a Chrome App (formerly called a Packaged App). Currently the React toolkit developed by Facebook and Instagram has achieved a certain dominance in web app development and it functions well in both environments.
One of the amazing strengths of React is the size of the ecosystem that has grown up around it. There are a large number of addons, mixins, and other projects that augment its capabilities. The sheer amount of functionality (code) available is staggering. But before I get too far into React I should really talk about Node.js. Node.js is simply a runtime environment for javascript code. Like React Node.js also has acquired a large ecosystem of code that can be executed in the runtime, perhaps most famously the "Node Package Manager" always referred to as npm.
npm helps solve one of the problems javascript projects have suffered from in the past: how to organize the code so that it can be understood by humans (file naming, directory structure, and small encapsulated chunks of functionality) and packaged for efficient delivery to a javascript runtime. One solution is to use npm packages with source code organized following CommonJS conventions. Both Node.js and npm understand CommonJS and can work with it directly but browsers can not. However as in all things Node.js + npm there's a package for that: browserify. Browserify is a toolkit that reads CommonJS files and converts them into javascript that a web browser can execute. Additionally Browserify supports "transforms" that can be applied to CommonJS source files before they are parsed and transform (modify) them in some way if necessary. Also Browserify can generate "source maps" so that later in the browser's debugger the original source files can be debugged rather than the bowserified files. As we've seen Browserify has been packaged so that it's available in the Node.js environment through npm.
Now back to React. React files are regular javascript except they support the use of JSX syntax. JSX is a little like HTML embedded in your javascript. Unfortunately neither javascript runtimes or browserify understand JSX, but there's a package for that. Through npm we have access to reactify, a browserify transform that will convert the JSX syntax into plain old javascript. Once the JSX is converted browserify can bundle up the code for a web browser.
Of course there are many other steps in preparing a web app for delivery to a server. Node.js + npm can do this too using a variety of task / build utilities, I chose to use gulp. Briefly here are some things you can do with gulp: bowserify (including reactify), conditionally affect stream piping (using gulp-if), copy and modify a JSON file (using gulp-json-editor, generate jsdoc documentation, minify output, copy files, and much more.
With Node.js + npm + gulp + browserify + reactify we can create javascript web applications where the code is organized in a manageable fashion by using CommonJS conventions and we get a high performance UI with React. If you think that those are a lot of pieces to put together from scratch you're right, so don't. You can get off to a faster start using the Node.js-Browser-App repository on github. This repository has all the components described above (plus a Flux dispatcher) so you can just copy the repo and start building a web app or Chrome App.
Incidentally, once you've got your project going you'll find a lot of cloud services can work with it. For example Microsoft's(!) Azure can be setup with webhooks from github so that every time your source code changes it will: fetch the updates from the repository, build using Node.js, and deploy the output.
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