Feel free to disregard this thread and move to the next. But for those starting new projects in 2014, this might be highly valuable.
This is a very dangerous question, I fully understand that this might very well explode into a thousand directions and would most definitely be shut down on Stackoverflow right away. But me searching the web only returns unweighted link lists that I do not nearly value as much as opinions on here.
In 2014, what's the status-quo on best-practices for front-end development, API-based, moderate traffic (10k to 200k daily visits) websites, with authenticated user dashboards?
I've been doing this since Perl/CGI times and have evolved through technology and done every and anything from html/html5/php/yii/js/perl/ruby/rails/python/django/angular/css/css3 and whatnot throughout the years. I feel most tools can get the job done either way, some are more comfortable, some are more reliable, some are more flexible, some are more resistant against high traffic.
If you would go about creating something like a small Google Analytics front-end, which fetches ALL it's data through a private API backend (JSON) and has user authentication to reach those dashboards/analytics --- what would be your weapons of choice, and why?
And please, don't pick by passion only (looking at you, Haskell, Scala, Go guys) - don't forget your business objectives - developer scarcity/availability, failure-recovery (and knowledge thereof), long-term experience with stability and maintenance resources on the web, etc.
Go!
Light-weight PHP front-end (epiphany, minimal framework) for user authentication against MYSQL database that just holds user data and nothing else. CSS3 + HTML5 templates, dynamically rendered/finalised on-the-fly through AJAX calls and JSON data that gets filled into those templates through JavaScript. Hosted on a root or virtual server. Can be scaled by duplicating servers (possibly even EC2) and load-balancing if necessary. Though a good root server handles 100k users a day without a hitch.
Alternatively: Javascript+HTML5+CSS3 hosted on S3 and authentication run through the API backend. Traffic-immune, deployable anywhere, easy to test. Minimal cost. Might feel odd to the user though, when everything just clicks/works instantly (look how far we've come).