I took the same approach for a while up until I started rolling my own framework to speed things up. Now I just stick to Yii + postgres. Backend gets developed

I took the same approach for a while up until I started rolling my own framework to speed things up. Now I just stick to Yii + postgres. Backend gets developed first with Yii's code gen tools, then the sexy ajax fun gets put into the clientside and the auto genned CRUD code gets extended to pass any additional fields I need back to the client. Yii's CRUD code gen is incredibly nice to work with off the bat, so it really comes down to customizing json form validation messages and packing some partials views in with the response. edit: It has ended up being that a good 70% of my time in web app dev is devoted to the tedium of changing little UI crap (Can this blue pop a little more? Can you put some shadowing here? I like this slider but I'm not feeling hyped about it... repeat ad infinitum), and not so much with complex backend work. It takes about two days, as you said, to get the server code going strong, and then two weeks to move divs around by an em here or there.