Here's my current dev setting for my web app.
The entry page is a static html file, say index.html. I don't really want to care about the server end services, so what I'm doing now is to start a local grunt http server to load all my local javascript files and other resources, and use grunt proxy to redirect all client REST requests to a real server to get data. This makes it very easy because I don't really need to setup the server environment and I can actually use any existing server as long as it provides those REST apis that the client needs.
However, one day, I figured I need server to tell me some information at the first response. So, what I can think of is changing the index.html to index.jsp. I really don't want to do another request to server after the index.html and its javascript files are downloaded because of performance concern. So, how can I still use grunt server as I used to do?