[timwaagh]

the idea of using a backend platform for a frontend task like templating has a big flaw. you can't use any part of the template from javascript. so you might need to write everything twice when you start using ajax. I think it would be better to pass the data from your controller to something like node which then renders the html. then you could reuse this at the front end. of course doing the entire view part by front end javascript is also a possibility (with the disadvantage your site would not work when the user disables javascript). I think non-node web frameworks should address this problem by making it easy to let node do the rendering.