[Gigablah]

> I bought into the notion that the backend should just be a client-agnostic API

There can be more than one backend -- your API is a microservice and you can have another backend that proxies this service and renders templates server-side. This also means you can define SEO-friendly URIs as opposed to your presumably RESTful API endpoints.

[freyr]

Yeah, this is the approach I've transitioned to. It's certainly better overall, but there's still an issue of maintaining some duplicated code on the server side and the client side.

There are some projects that specifically address this (Rendr, Lazo, Ezel), but I haven't made the switch to one of those yet.