Not directly related to the article, but I think the presentation linked at the end[0] is a good practical intro to Backbone.js and rich-client-side architecture.

Not having Rails background myself, I find that it nicely summarizes key differences between ‘traditional’ server-rendered and newer styles of writing web applications. I wish I came across something similar when I was starting with Backbone.js.

[0] http://speakerdeck.com/u/brennandunn/p/rails-without-views

Glad you enjoyed it! A video of my talk (you can only infer so much from slides) will hopefully be available soon.

This truly is a great, measured response to all the crazy talk about punting all of the great work that Rails and the core team has done over the last 7 years. Bravo.

Agreed. I have little patience for people who fuss all day about tools and rarely use them. Wordpress is a slow, leaky, kludgy CMS, but it is growing share every second due to its awesome community where all the sexy node.js projects are limping along relative to WP.

Rails has a special place in my heart because it helped me to become a hacker, not just a geek. It made me learn how to be resourceful, and embrace abstraction.

I agree that we still need backends but I think they will need to move locations. The client app should sit on a dedicated server for serving static resources; Apache and Nginx do this very well. The new "backend" will just be your API endpoint. CORS will make this much easier but for now proxy pass will suffice.

In 2012 I see no reason why a JavaScript application should be served by anything but a dedicated web server.

Is this the endgame, apps split between client and server?.

I sincerely hope not, the current popularity for moving things client is just a band aid. The real problem is the network is not quick and redundant enough.

Ideally every node on the internet would be a server.