[codr7]

Likewise, I never liked JS much, nor the frontend dev experience.

I started out with the Seaside framework, but I've done several variations on that theme in different languages along the way.

It goes something like this: A typed server side DOM with support for native callbacks, generates HTML and hooks up callbacks. Changes are submitted to the server similar to traditional HTML forms, but using JSON. Changes to the DOM generate JS that's returned from the submit.

One headache with this approach is that documents need to stick around or callbacks will fail, and you need to hit the same server to get the document.

It should be doable to put a serialized version of the DOM on the client and passing that to callbacks to be rebuilt on the server.