There is the straw man again. If you are creating a completely client side app and you find it's better to have some work done on the server side... why not use mature existing server side technology along with client side technologies. It's not a one or the other scenario.
Why work hard to move client-side technologies to the server? javascript is not so good that I want it on the server-side. And server-side lanaguages are not hard to learn or hard to find people that know how to use them.
That was the straw man I was thinking I saw in the post.
Why not use rails to load the page (no BYO framework involved) and then use javascript/backbone/etc on the client-side; as opposed to bringing the client-side technologies server-side to accomplish the same thing?
I'm thinking specifically of the search page example that was represented as a screenshot in this blog.
I'm utterly confused. The main benefit of this approach is summed up in the paragraph:
"Compare this with serving the full search results HTML from the server.... It feels 5x faster."
But doesn't ruby on rails (and most other web stacks) already do server side rendering VERY well and are hugely supported by enormous communities. Javascript is useful for things like infinite scroll, interactive client side calendars or making browser based games; but a web search is absolutely simple in ROR and doesn't need backbone or javascript at all.
Don't get me wrong, I love javascript and backbone / angular. But why push logic to the client side for a search page and then try to pull client-side technologies back to the server side in an effort to resolve performance problems that are already solved by existing technology?
In the words of Carl Sagan "why not skip a step". Unless you just love javascript so much that you're willing to recreate rails on the server side with it. That would be a sensible reason to do it.
Not trying to troll, just thought I'd throw this perspective out there.
Or does this logic belong in the Route.js file? I am clearly confused.
FYI.. rails didn't invent mvc; it was invented in the 70's for smalltalk.