I have some experience developing websites, but none with proper web applications.
But this time I’m creating more of a web application, my server will surely handle API calls from a mobile app (iPhone/Android/MeeGo (…or not)) or even from third party clients.
So I’m thinking, is it really necessary that the “website” –the frontend part of my application using HTML (5)/CSS (3) and JS–interacts with my backend in a different way than my other “frontends”?
Am I thinking wrong? I think this is a common problem, and I need some experimented advices on that. Thank you for your help.
Actually No. You’re thinking it the right way. You can Javascript to interact with your Rest API, so you can focus only on writing a scalable API, and the UI.
That’s the approach taken by Twitter. Their web site, is a Rails application that uses the twitter API, written mostly in Scala, and uses by the hundreds of twitter clients out there, whether mobile or desktop app.