I am having great difficulty choosing which frameworks to use for an app that is about to go into development. I am a front-end guy, and my friend is doing the back-end.
Say I was developing a simple todo list app. I have a template for each item on the todo list. Ideally, I would want the server-side JavaScript to use this template as well as the client-side JavaScript.
So on page load, if there are already 5 todos in the database, the HTML will be compiled on the server. If I then add a new todo item to the list, the client-side JS will compile the HTML using the same template.
I've heard a lot of buzz about Node.js, Backbone.js, etc. It is quite overwhelming just how many options there are for this sort of thing. Can anybody give me examples of using these technologies together?