For really small projects, a proper backend is not always necessary and talking directly to the db can speed up development. I wouldn&#x27;t dare do that for anything serious though.<p>Couchdb is also a really nice way to do this, since it provides you with an extensive (an extensible) rest api out of the box, serves your site and even gets you a nice heroku like deployment workflow with the Couchapp project (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;couchapp&#x2F;couchapp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;couchapp&#x2F;couchapp</a>). Sticking it behind varnish is really easy too.