Who are the players in the server-side showdown?

Today I have finished reading the preface in "ASP.NET Core 2 and Angular 5" by Valerio De Sanctis and, yes, this is worth mentioning and a real part of the book's 517 pages before the blank white page before the index. The pages are labeled with modern day numbers and not those funny Roman numerals or Egyptian hieroglyphics or whatever so it's legit, right? Things mentioned in the preface include WinRAR, 7-Zip for Windows, Zipeg, iZip, UnRarX for Mac, 7-Zip, and PeaZip for Linux which are unzipping tools, the .NET Core Windows Server Hosting bundle which when installed (Windows Server 2008 R2 is suggested for the platform) should allow one to host .NET Core at IIS which I suppose will not just happen out of the box, PathLocationStrategy which extends LocationStrategy and seems to, at a glance, allow for URLs with a leading backslash to use some route other than the most minimal one as the base URL, database management system (DBMS)-based Data Models of Entity Framework which have an Entity Data Model (EDM) shape matching one-for-one database columns in tables, Angular Template Syntax as a formal name for the markup in component templates, and the Angular Model-Driven approach as sort of a rationale in buzzword form for the reactive forms that everyone hates. There is a big opening about how exciting the frontend space is right now, and, then, almost as an afterthought, the race to make things better at the server-side is mentioned too. Java and Ruby are not mentioned at all. The author seems to see three big players. Surprisingly one of them is PHP due to some modern frameworks:

1. Symfony
2. Laravel
3. Zend
4. Yii
5. Expressive
6. Silex
7. Slim

 
 

So what are the other two platforms worth caring about beyond PHP? Well, it probably won't surprise you to learn that ASP.NET Core makes the list. The book mentions that its run-anywhere nature (demanding a complete rewrite of the ASP.NET Framework) now runs on not just macOS but also:

1. Debian
2. SUSE, an operating system OS built on an open-source Linux kernel wherein the name stands for "Software und System-Entwicklung" German for: "Software and systems development"
3. ARM32-native builds for Raspberry Pi (ARM stands for Advanced RISC Machine and originally Acorn RISC Machine wherein RISC is: reduced instruction set computing)

 
 

Finally, we have Node as the third player. The book namedrops a few things for the Node space and amongst them AdonisJS, a UI framework, was the only one I had not heard of before.