I completely disagree that the "normal" way of doing web development (frameworks such as Rails, Django, and the PHP frameworks) is obsolete. First of all, these frameworks can easily be used to build the Ajax-heavy web apps that the author(s) of the article talk about.

Secondly, search engines don't play too well with the Ajaxy web apps. It's not that you can't make them search engine friendly, it's just that once you do that, there's a bigger need for the "normal" frameworks.

Thirdly, I still prefer languages such as Python or PHP to JavaScript.