After doing this for a while, we begin to realize that we should just get rid of the server side templates and handle rendering on the client This is the only

After doing this for a while, we begin to realize that we should just get rid of the server side templates and handle rendering on the client This is the only way to flatten the technology stack, anything else just created a bigger ball of technical debt. The advantages of REST and JavaScript applications over the old model are not apparent until you make this mental leap. Once a person does the simplicity of the architecture becomes apparent. Well, not so fast. Not all pages should be rendered client side. Some pages need to be indexed by search engines, and they need to be rendered on the server. This is not a concern if you do a little browser sniffing, if you run into a search bot, you send it to a server that has a headless web-browser script on it, that pulls the content from the primary server, and delivers it to the bot as a single unified page. Further most of the major search engines are fairly far along in their ability to index client side dynamic content, some you have to give a little help with #! and such, but for the most part, search is not a valid reason to hang on to the legacy of server side views.