Gamemixerr
New Member
I've been trawling SO for a couple of hours tonight looking for some answers, but I've not found anything that really answers what I'm after. My apologies if it has, in fact, been answered already.I'm designing a new website and I'm trying to decide on the architecture to use to serve the content. In the past, my websites have used PHP feeding data into Smarty templates.However, recently at my work, I've been working on a Java web application where jQuery was used to retrieve the data from a RESTful API (which returned JSON), where HTML template pages were used as the base and javascript was used (utilising jQuery) to fill in the content.My question: The website I'm designing will be in PHP, but would it be better to construct (or use an existing) RESTful API or to continue on as I've done before feeding the data into Smarty templates?Are there real benefits to one or the other, or does it just come down to developer preference/experience?If it helps, the website will be for a church, where the content types will be CMS-like; news/announcements, wiki-like pages, and a limited type of social networking (for the minister to communicate with parishioners).