Yes, but you often end up with half an angular app: a bit of templating, a bit of boilerplate around your AJAX calls, some AJAX here and there. But you quickly run into problems:
- Your designers need to change the markup of the invalid form alerts, and you have to point them to a string building function in your JS rather than an HTML template.
- Once they change the string builder, you need to run your unit tests to make sure it still works. If you don't have any way to do dependency injection, writing unit tests of client side code will be difficult.
- Now your presentation logic is split between front and back end. This makes engineering tasks like assessing test coverage and refactoring more difficult.
For some use cases AJAX only may work. When I'm doing a side project that involves a lot of visual stuff and little state management, I'll ditch the MVC framework and task runner and work with just jQuery or D3. But if I'm working on a large project where many other people are contributing, I want a framework that helps me write testable code and provides structure to help keep my concerns separated.
