If you are sick of javascript on the front end, but don't want to give up the fancy-pants UI, you could do worse than my library, intercooler, which lets you add AJAX to your app with a few HTML attributes.

http://intercoolerjs.org

Make REST work the way it was intended, supports CSS transitions, request indicators, etc.

Good little library that eliminates a lot of complexity for web apps that don't need all this junk (most of them.)