I typically build web apps with a frontend (using something like React) and a backend (using Ruby/Rails or Java/Spring). I recently became curious if it's possible to forgo a backend completely and just have your client code directly call your database. No apis, etc. Just frontend directly connecting to db for everything you need. No use of node, express, etc or other "backend" solutions for JS.
If someone has a tutorial or example to show, that would be great.
If it is possible, what are the disadvantages to doing this besides that it's not standard? I am guessing there are probably security issues (but they aren't coming to mind). You are shipping more code than is necessary to the client, perhaps causing performance issues. Lastly, it might be a little harder to encapsulate business logic. The advantage to me seems to be simplicity, only dealing with 1 technology, etc.