[okfn-labs] Architecture for a data-driven web app

[Friedrich Lindenberg]

Hi all,

I'm working on a web app for some read-only data which should be
browsable on the web. The whole thing has about 10 domain objects,
which I'm already exposing through a simple, RESTish API. Now I want
to make a user interface, which I would like to have two properties:

a) It should be dog-fooding the API
b) It should be easy to crawl and index for search engines.

I'm not quite sure how to build this: if I use only browser-based
templating, Google will not index thing properly and I may not get
working URLs for entries, even using the HTML5 history stuff.

This means the cleanest setup seems to be to build another app, using
API output but generating HTML server-side. I may be able to make a
nicer UX by using node.js and sharing some template rendering with a
browser-based app (like GitHub's file browser).

Is there another way? I'd really like to avoid a full proxy app if
possible, but can't come up with a good model.

Cheers,

 - Friedrich