I don't work there, but I doubt it. With rendr, both the client- and server-side portions of the Backbone stack still need to consume an upstream API. If I had to guess, I'd say that for projects they're building that use this stack, all the templating/rendering/presentation logic is in JS, but that the database interaction stuff probably isn't; they probably have Rails apps that expose a RESTful API that the rendr apps consume.

This is exactly right. We still have 5 years worth of business logic in Rails, so we just expose a RESTful API as part of the Rails app. The same API is consumed by our iOS, Android, Mobile Web, and Desktop clients.

Cool stuff, very interesting concept, would love to see an example working with a Rails RESTful API.

The app template is such an example, consuming the public GitHub API: https://github.com/airbnb/rendr-app-template

In the future, we'd like to come up with some more in-depth tutorials.

Great thanks I'll take a look at it again, I seen the "Interacting with a RESTful API" section in the wiki left blank and assumed it was in the pipeline.

IIRC, they are using node.js and rendr for their mobile site and still use Rails for the main website.

We're using Rendr in a few more apps in production, in progress. It's starting to eat away at our Rails site a bit.