Issue
I'm trying to do a single page application using servlets and jsp pages. For the moment I have the first page, which is simple to do: a servlet that forwards to the corresponding jsp.
How should the implementation look when navigating to the second page? I guess it should be an ajax call, the servlet would populate the necessary data, but how to display the second page jsp?
Solution
In SPA the browser only loads the document once (or a few, once per sub-application), and further communication to the server is done usually via AJAX or Websockets.
I recommend you to model your application as a thin server architecture, that is, a client application running in the browser (HTML, CSS, Javascript) consuming a web service API provided by the server.
The following are some points worth knowing;
Client-side:
- Only presentation logic
- Represent state by URL hash. This enables bookmarking, hyperlinking and browsing history. Your client app should listen to changes in the URL hash and act in consequence. This technique is called "routing" and it is implemented by all Javascript frameworks.
- Client application is packaged server-side such it can be downloaded in a single request (in .html, .jsp, servlet, .jsp + multiple .jspf, ...)
- Consumes services provided by the server via AJAX or Websockets
Server:
- Offers client application to download
- Provides a clean, stateless API to be consumed by the client application, better returning JSON (data) than HTML (presentation logic) (Why is it a bad practice to return generated HTML instead of JSON? Or is it?)
- Use a REST or JSON-RPC frameworks to create the API. There is a lot of debate on what to choose (see here or here). In my opinion the only advantage of REST over RPC is that since REST has become a "de facto" standard its interoperability is higher, so my recommendation for SPA applications is using JSON-RPC, because your code is the only client of the API.
There are lots of alternatives for both client and server frameworks.
Javascript: AngularJS, EmberJS or Backbone,...
REST: Spring, Jersey, Restlet,..
JSON-RPC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-RPC#Implementations
Regarding JSON-RPC, you might want to take a look to Brutusin-RPC, a JEE microframework I have created :)
Answered By - idelvall
