NodeJS Vs Static HTML

I've a Java Rest API, and I'd like to implement a browser client. and I wonder which would be better and what are my trade offs in choosing between

  1. Static HTML files with backbone that would connect to the REST api and fill in the data feilds..
  2. NodeJS Application that would serve the same static files but load the data into the templates with nodejs modules before displaying them ?

NodeJS is designed for server side. If you got already a Java server side which provides REST API, I recommend you to call directly this API from static HTML files or another client... it will be faster than reload data passing by NodeJS modules.