title: Restful API or Traditional web app
body: <p>I see web application community seems to have two different way to build a rich experience web applications.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Build a backend as pure Restful API server, and use javascript MVC frameworks like backbone + UX design frameworks like twitter-bootstrap to build the UI frontend.</p>
  
  <p>-- I see people call this a think-client approach coz lots of logic happens on browser side; plus, designing Restful API interface (especially an extensible one) requires a lot of extra thinking process than the following approach</p></li>
  <li><p>Use a web application framework like RoR or Django to build the web app, the widely used approach.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>This question is sort of related to <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10862839/is-using-restful-api-as-a-custom-web-app-backend-needed">Is using RESTful Api as a custom web app backend needed?</a>. I know that approach 1 may help reusing the development work for supporting native apps, but how much more up-front overhead it impose over approach 2?</p>