I'm conceptually designing a website / application and trying to come up with the correct separation of concerns.
The basic technologies I'm settling on are: MySQL, PHP (Laravel), HTML/JS (jQuery). It's been a few years since I've written PHP, and since then I've gotten very used to MVC and MVVM approaches.
I would like to stay away from using PHP as a templating engine. My reason for this is that I want to keep presentation solely to JS and HTML code, with none of it mixed in with server-side code. To achieve this, my thinking is to stick with using PHP to create services, then call those services from JS / AJAX on the pages.
As far as I can tell, this approach would allow me to keep PHP to handling data and the client will handle all of the logic and presentation.
My main concern is that I am having a difficult time finding any resources outlining similar approaches used in the real world. Almost every single instance I can find of PHP being used has it implemented as a templating engine, dropping HTML and data onto pages when they're being sent from the server.
Are there any obvious flaws in my approach that I've missed?
I'm entirely open to changing my thinking on this one - no code has been written yet so the architecture is mine to play with :)
Thanks!