Client side MVC instead of server side MVC [closed]

Question

Instead of using server side MVC like Ruby, Python, PHP to build very complex websites, why should not we split our website into multiple modules, and build each with client side MVC like backboneJS, EmberJS. In this case, we will use PHP / Ruby for creating webservices alone, which will serve data only.

Each module now act as small web app. If we link each other, they will perfectly look like a complex web app.

I visit many websites (like github, groupon, stackoverflow etc...) and they can be built or adopted to this approach. But i am not seeing this kind of approach. Does this approach has any problem on this kind of websites?

Answer 1

Was to long for a comment

I guess the tricky part is indeed the point you mentioned

f we link each other, they will perfectly look like a complex web app.

Because each MVC framework uses a different approach to tackle usual problems you have in modern web-apps, like routing, data binding, application state and rendering DOM elements, so I think you would end up having multiple frameworks doing tasks that overlap substantially, thus forcing you to deactivate or disable some of the built-in functionality of one or the other framework making your frankenstein-app :) very difficult to maintain.

A good example is jQuery-mobile & ember.js, both have a routing system, jQuery uses the DOM to hold state ember.js holds it's state completely in javascript which is much faster. I had a similar problem with a project using jQuery-mobile & ember.js and this forced me to decide for one of the routing systems, I took ember's and deactivated jQuery's wich then let with just a bunch of custom mobile-looking components on the side of jQuery-mobile. Finally I removed jQuery-mobile using ember.js only and CSS for the mobile-looking app.

If not because of a concrete requirement, IMHO your best bet is to have just one very good, flexible and opinionated framework (personally I prefer ember.js) and create the modules you mentioned with your only choice.

Hope it helps.