Nickel is a framework that builds over existing technologies and focus in providing a solid starting point for minimum viable products. Hopefully, reducing their time to market while fulfulling the most common non-functional and functional requirements of typical modern apps.
Nickel is built with JavaScript. It uses meteor as a development and build tool and at the time has a dependency with meteor accounts. Nevertheless these dependencies might be removed in the future and as long as you use the (yet to be) documented APIs, you will be OK.
If you want access to the repositories within Jalasoft or the Jala Foundation please contact a member of the team.