[dos1]

Client side rendering and single page applications are not the best solution for most applications. I posit that a partial page refresh approach using PJAX (or something like it) where the server always sends back HTML is a more efficient and rapid approach to development.

There was an article yesterday about how Airbnb was going through some serious gymnastics to get a fully rendered HTML page on initial request and then keep it interactive and client side rendered after that. Why bother? Just send back HTML all the time.

I worked on a very large (100+ developer) application that was fully bought in on Backbone + JSON api consumption. In the few cases where there was a lot of client interactivity (editable grids and drag and drop, most notably) the client side rendering approach made sense. For 90 percent of the application though, partial rendering of HTML from the server would have made things easier and less complicated (and faster!) The initial time to usable page is MUCH longer when you render static content, then make an ajax call to get the data.

[amalag]

It was interesting a few years ago that Twitter went from server rendered HTML to client rendered HTML back to server rendered HTML (current).