To maximize the efficiency of your resources, it is crucial to keep your service and UI tiers completely independent. By designing your services without a specific UI in mind, you can ensure maximum reusability. I highly recommend implementing RESTful web services for their flexibility in UI integration. With numerous libraries available that can easily consume data from such services, the possibilities are endless.

While I may not be well-versed in Ruby development, here is a basic example of a web service implementation in Sinatra:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
require 'lib/posts'

post '/posts'
    post = Post.create! params
    redirect "/posts/#{post.id}"
do

get 'posts/:id' do
    @post = Post.find(params[:id])
    erb :post
end

Credit: Lightweight Webservices with Sinatra and RESTClient.

The language or platform used for service implementation is not as important as ensuring it is RESTful and easily consumable by clients. Once this foundation is established, choosing an integration library becomes key when developing either a web app or mobile app:

• HTML(5)/CSS/Javascript: A popular choice for integrating web service APIs into applications, offering versatile frameworks like Angular.js, Ext.js, Backbone.js, Knockout.js, jQuery Mobile, and Bootstrap. This method is widely utilized for both web and mobile app development.
• Middle Tier Proxy: Utilized to avoid browser-based Ajax for security reasons or to prevent XSS vulnerabilities. The proxy can be written in various languages (Java, PHP, Ruby, Perl) and generates dynamic HTML for the UI by consuming web services.

For instance, in my current project, we have implemented a range of RESTful web services using Java EE/JAX-RS on clustered JBoss servers. These services primarily return JSON but can also generate XML and are accessed by:

• Internal and external web applications utilizing Ext.js
• iOS apps leveraging AFNetworking/RestKit/NSURLConnection
• Android apps using Jersey REST Client

The beauty of this setup is its ability to serve multiple platforms/UIs without necessitating any modifications on the service side, aligning perfectly with your goals.

Since you're well-versed in native development and comfortable with Java, I recommend utilizing DropWizard for your API development to serve JSON through a RESTful endpoint.

The process for creating a website is similar to that of a mobile app, but using web development languages.

Here are the steps:

• Send a request to the API.
• Receive a JSON response.
• Parse the JSON into an object.
• Create a user interface representation using HTML, CSS, etc.
• Display the UI representation.

You just need to choose which language you want to use for making the POST/GET requests - PHP, Ajax, or any other language of your preference.

When creating a multi-platform app, I always prioritize code and algorithms that can be easily reused across different platforms. By structuring my APIs (using PHP and MySQL, for instance) to handle data in the same format for all platforms, both mobile and web projects are able to seamlessly read and send data via JSON or XML.

Centralizing all database connections within the API significantly reduces the number of connections and potential errors, making the overall development process much smoother.

To see this concept in action, take a look at Foursquare's implementation.

It seems like you're in search of a lightweight web development framework that is user-friendly and allows for the creation of dynamic websites.

Given your criteria that the front-end must be able to send HTTP GET/POST requests to retrieve JSON data from an API, I recommend the following options:

1. Using HTML with AJAX (suitable for simple dynamic sites)
2. Employing PHP with AJAX (ideal for more complex projects)

The AJAX call for the GET/POST request can be executed using a JavaScript library such as jQuery. Furthermore, jQuery offers functions for parsing the JSON response seamlessly.

In essence, mastering PHP and jQuery would be beneficial as both are widely used, beginner-friendly, and boast strong community support.

When it comes to building single-page applications that interact with web services, AngularJS shines. However, mastering AngularJS requires a steeper learning curve compared to simple jQuery ajax calls. Depending on your project requirements, using jQuery may be a more suitable choice for developing your app.

There are other JavaScript MVC frameworks like knockout and ember.js that offer similar functionality for fetching data from JSON sources. If you're interested, explore these options to see if they better suit your needs.

Alternatively, you can simply create an HTML page and initiate ajax calls to the necessary services once the page has loaded.

In a previous chapter of my professional journey, I specialized as a Web Developer for a decade. However, in the last 2.5 years, I have transitioned into becoming a full-time Mobile Developer, where I focus on creating innovative Android and iOS Apps using SOAP or REST APIs.

When working on web projects, my go-to tools are JQuery and JQuery-UI. I find JQuery particularly handy for seamlessly retrieving JSON data from SOAP or REST Web Services to enrich grids, forms, and interactive controls that enhance user experience. You can explore more about this at: http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.getJSON/

At present, I am engrossed in an iOS App project that involves extensive use of REST operations and JSON data. Concurrently, our Web Development Team is leveraging backbone.js along with JSON-REST functionalities for building a robust backend Website. This not only streamlines communication between the frontend and backend but also facilitates easy interaction with the same backend through JSON-REST in the iOS application. Their reliance on backbone.js methods like parse (for JSON reading), collection.toJSON() (for JSON conversion), and Model sync methods is quite prominent. For further details, you can visit .

As echoed by others, having access to JSON data via REST enables seamless integration across both web and mobile applications, thereby fostering consistency in development practices.

Lastly, I recommend perusing an insightful blog article on best practices for setting up a RESTful API server: .

Wishing you success in your endeavors!

When it comes to developing web applications that consume web services (specifically JSON contents), there are two main approaches to consider:

• The Pure HTML approach: With this model, you can create a web application without the need for server-side scripts like PHP, JSP, or ASP.Net. Instead, JavaScript is used to interact with your JSON-based REST service and display the data within HTML components. This programming model has gained popularity due to its smooth performance, making applications behave like desktop applications. There are various frameworks available, including Angular.js, Ext.js, Backbone.js, Knockout.js, DoJo, and Bootstrap, which facilitate achieving this goal. Some of these frameworks even offer data binding capabilities with UI components and support consuming REST services without any additional coding. An example of such a framework is DoJo.

• HTML and Server-side script approach: This method involves utilizing a server-side scripting language like PHP, JSP, JSF, as well as frameworks like RoR and Django to develop web applications. While this approach offers more flexibility, it comes with a learning curve compared to the pure HTML and JavaScript-based approach.

In conclusion, starting with the first approach - the Pure HTML approach - is recommended for beginners.

If your current API's are already built using Ruby, then Ruby on Rails may be a suitable option for you to explore further. As someone who mainly works with C# and iOS development, I recently delved into Ruby on Rails and found it to be a versatile language with a good balance of simplicity and flexibility. To learn more, check out this helpful link .

Ruby on Rails also offers great support for implementing jQuery and other JavaScript libraries.

In addition, you have the option of working with databases such as Sqlite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.