Appropriate back-end for a single-page web application?

Question

Historically I've mainly written web apps in Django, but now I'm increasingly finding that I want to write single-page web apps using Backbone.js or a similar JavaScript framework, with a back-end that solely consists of a database and an API.

My questions is this. If my application structure looks like this:

 1. Database
 |
 v
 2. API methods
 |
 v
 3. Single-page front-end written with Backbone

and I'm most comfortable in Django - but also keen to learn new things too, such as NoSQL and Node, if they are appropriate - what would people recommend I use for (2)?

Typically I would use Django with Piston as the API app, but it seems rather heavyweight to have all of Django and only use it as an API provider. Perhaps I shouldn't be worrying, though.

Answer 1

If you use Django, which is an MVC framework, and use Backbone, you might be comfortable setting up your app in pure Node.js or Express.js, with additional modules for connecting to your choice of database.

With Express, if you plan to serve only JSON via RESTful interface, you don't even need to use Views, which is handy. You would only need to set up models and routes (that also serve as controllers).