With the right set of abstractions, you can use an API to get data from the client side, and a direct local database lookup (or cache here, or whatever) on the

With the right set of abstractions, you can use an API to get data from the client side, and a direct local database lookup (or cache here, or whatever) on the server. This is, of course, a bit more difficult than the simplest version, and probably isn't worth it until you're further along.