Thinking of new way of building a db page populating data via api calls - are there any issues doing it this way

Question

Up to know, for DB driven web sites, I've used php (and CodeIgniter) to populate the data within the page prior to rendering, what I'm thinking about doing now is to develop a javascript (via jquery) page, make it as interactive as possible and then connect to the db through ajax/json calls - so NO data populated to the screen prior to rendering.

WHY? sort of an idea that I can, some day, hook the same web page to different data sources - a true separation of page from data - linking only via ajax.

I think the biggest issue could be performance...are there other things to watch out for? What's the best approach to handling security (stateless/sessionless)?

Answer 1

Definitely something I've considered doing but you'd probably want to develop some kind of framework (or see if someone already has) if you're going to do this. Brute forcing this kind of thing will lead to a lot of redundant code and unnecessary hair loss. Perhaps a jQuery plugin? I'd be very interested to see what you came up with.

Answer 2

The biggest question is accessibility. What about those people using screenreaders, for which Javascript doesn't work? What about those on mobile phones (non-smartphones), again with very limited or no Javascript functionality? What about those people who have simply disabled JS? Event these days, you simply can't assume that everyone can use JS.

I like the original idea, but perhaps this would be better done via a simple server-side wrapper, which calls out to your data source but which can be quickly and easily changed to point at a different one.