The choice is less clear obvious when you've started to ask why use server-side templating at all? I've spent quite a bit of time on both Rails and Java webapps

The choice is less clear obvious when you've started to ask why use server-side templating at all? I've spent quite a bit of time on both Rails and Java webapps. The conclusion I've come to is I'd really rather the server just returned JSON and rendering happened client-side. I'm not working on Twitter-scale stuff, though.