Should I use MVC both on client and server?

Question

I've decided to use MVC Pattern on my site. So, now I use Backbone.js framework on my site. All actions on my site are ajaxy, so server only gets data from db, and saves data to db.

Do I need to use MVC on the server side too? It's complicating all, isn't it?

Or I may use MVC on client side, and have simple server api, that only fetches/saves data and makes some small server job?

UPD: I understand that I should use Models on server side. But what are Views for on server side - if I render all information with javascript?

So, Is it a good pattern, that server side works only with raw data - models - it always returns json, and has no relation with html-markup and other things related to Views ?

Answer 1

No, you don't need to use it server-side, but it will help with organization / separation of application and business logic. Depending on the scale of your application, that could help tremendously in the future.

The key is just making sure you organize your backend code well, otherwise you will end up with a monolithic and/or difficult-to-maintain codebase.

Edit in response to OP's edit:
Server-side views would contain your HTML and any JavaScript that may or may not make requests to the server. This assumes that you are actually using PHP to build the pages that a user navigates to.

If you have a static html page that builds itself using AJAX requests, then you may not need to use server-side views at all. Your controllers would more than likely be outputting JSON data. If this is the case, it doesn't make models and controllers any less useful.