We have started a massive framework building exercise, using the POCO and building repositories and services and such stuff. Now when it comes to the UI, we decided to go ahead with MVC3 and JQuery. Things were fine initially, but now I see all the UI being exclusively developed using JQuery.

Two major problems I see with this approach are the development time and UI complexity has increased multifold, since the default MVC views are much cleaner/clearer and easier to generate/modify as soon as your model changes. While in JQuery the developers are often struggling to get things up and running with so much of scripting required. Also there are some strange situations where the controller action simply renders a view to have a JQuery call another controller action to fetch the actual data. I don't know if this is taking things to the extreme.

The only real advantage of JQuery seems to be for performance where partial page updates are necessary or you are moving a lot of data back and forth and need to prune it down to the last bit.

So what's the ideal mix? Use JQuery liberally or use it only where it really helps speed up things?

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