Is this kind of functionality / coding pattern used in new or modern applications? Couchdb, a (json) document database, whose api is http-based, had built-in l

Is this kind of functionality / coding pattern used in new or modern applications? Couchdb, a (json) document database, whose api is http-based, had built-in list and detail methods that allowed you to respond with any type of format you could generate within their javascript interpreter. In other words, no need for a server as the client can directly hit the database and get html and/or json back. After v1 they stopped working on that front as it makes for nightmare maintenance work. I think many here remember the good old days of php or asp files having sql statemts mixed with html all in a single file. This doesn't look very different.