How to integrate front-end and back-end seamlessly and automatically
backend, continuous-integration, frontend
Solution
I know this is a bit old, but I want to answer for people that might look at that.
Best thing to do in my opinion from what I have seen so far is, always, I emphasize always, to write a documentation stating in what I/O format would the information be transferred between both ends.
If you have clearer separation between front end and back end (using an API) then you could specify a doc which states exactly the input and output parameters. If parts of your front-end is being generated by the back end (which is not a really good practice, but it tends to happen quite a lot) then you still talk about what exactly should be in there and the front end developers can work on that, while the back end developers just put a dummy output until the front-end gets finished.
Problem
Since the development of a web application is usually divided into front-end development and back-end development but some codes in the front-end will be usually the same in the back-end (ASP, PHP, JSP or other server-side template engines contain a lot of HTML which is written by front-end developers), what the back-end developers need to do is to merge the HTML code into their ASP, PHP, JSP or other server-side templates. If the development of front-end starts before the one of back-end, it works fine. But when front-end and back-end are developed simultaneously (always like this), the problem comes. The back-end developer needs to change his template codes constantly when front-end changes. So, my question is, is there any way to merge the HTML code into the back-end template automatically, so that the integration of front-end and back-end will be more seamless and easy.