[melbourne-pug] Web App Architecture

[Adam MacLeod]

Hello Happy People of MPUG,

I have recently been hearing suggestions that rendering HTML on the
server side is becoming less relevant as JavaScript MVC (and other)
frameworks are developing.

Personally I feel that having all of the client rendering logic live
inside the browser as a client to an API based server application
seems like a decent way to go. I'm sure no one needs to hear this but
I believe it should allow the front end developers to write client
interaction code independently and the back end developers to focus on
data, security, speed and scalability.

As I see it there will be a MC (model-controller) type back-end that
supplies JSON to a model in a JavaScript MVC framework like
backbone.js, ember.js or what have you. I feel that the existing
Django/RoR type mega-framework is simply too heavy for this new MC
backend. Perhaps one of the micro-frameworks like Flask, Pyramid or
similar might be suitable.

I am extremely interested in hearing people's opinions on the following:

 - Whether this is/will ever be a good idea.
 - The size/scope of applications that this is suitable for (personal
website? small-time start up? buzzword-driven-development? Twitter?)
 - The current best practices regarding this type of architecture.

I guess the real meat of my message comes down to the following:

 - Which back-end would you use in Python for an application written
in this style?

Hoping to hear everyone chip in a few cents to this discussion :)

Cheers!
Adam MacLeod