Tarek Ziadé is a Python developer at Mozilla who writes about Python packaging, web server benchmarks and the Circus process manager.
HN commenters link his posts and talks, including his EuroPython talk on why Circus was built, and the author responds to feedback on release notes.
I've noticed this as well (and there was a post from Tarek Ziadé's blog a couple of days that mentioned it too) [1]
I've evolved to this approach - with the addition of WebSockets and a data binding layer (knockout) - to building the infrastructure for an algorithmic hedge fund over the last couple of years and it works extremely well.
Your backend components are free to do whatever they need to (in whatever language/technology) and publish data periodically. The web server simply dips into these streams of updates and transforms and routes them to the front end as needed. It's an extremely flexible and agile way to develop applications, I can't recommend it enough! In fact it's so nice to develop this way that I'm writing a book about the ideas and techniques I've used which I hope to post to HN in a couple of weeks when I've got the infrastructure and homepage up and running.
[1] Post: http://blog.ziade.org/2013/01/25/a-new-development-era-essay/ Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5120020
I watched a 60 minute talk from Tarek Ziadé a few months ago in EuroPython 2013 which was very interesting. His point regarding the missing features that made them launch project Circus were realtime stdout/stderr, realtime stats, powerful web console, remote, clustering and scalable.
You can check out the slides here: http://blog.ziade.org/slides/pyconireland2012/
I kinda did it for all previous releases, like the box on the right here: http://blog.ziade.org/2012/06/12/circus-04-released
Will do it for 0.6 thx for the feedback