[bryanlarsen]

This approach doesn't help. With highbrow and presumably rendr, you still have 'client side' & 'server side' components to your project. The 'server side' is typically just a JSON REST API. In our case, it uses mongoose to talk to mongodb. The 'client side' talks to the API and renders HTML; on first load it actually runs on the server. The client side uses Backbone.js models.

So you still need both backbone & mongoose/whatever validations if you want them both on the client & server side. In practice, the system is fast enough that server side validations may be sufficient.