Question

Can anyone psuedo a solution to my problem, or just give discussion to help me find a solution? I’ve always found that using JSP to populate HTML is a very awkward solution to creating pages, and if you want to convert to AJAX almost always results in needing to rewrite the whole “component” or whatever it is your displaying. I need a story viewer, and I’d like to have the actual work of populating the story viewer to be written in javascript, with one entry point, so that I can either bring in the information when the page loads, or refresh it using ajax, or use the component standalone on another page if I wish.

SERVER:

A server can configure the kinds of new stories available to a page, and the controller sends back a model populated with stories to display:

@RequestMapping(value="/news/{category}")
public String news(@PathVariable("category") String category, Model m) {

    m.addAttribute("featuredStory", newsService.getFeaturedStoryForCategory(category));
    m.addAttribute("otherRelatedStories", newsService.getStoriesByCategory(category, 3/*num of stories*/));
    return newsService.getViewNameForCategory(category);
}

VIEW:

<div>
<h1>Story Title Would Go Here</h1>
<div>maybe some text description here</div>
<img src="my image source would go here"/>
</div>

so that’s my basic setup, but now I need to get information from my servers model into components that look roughly like that, I’ve had several different thoughts, but I can’t seem to get any momentum going with them, one example is that I’m thinking at the of the page in the I could have something like this:

<javascript>
var populateFeaturedStoryWithJson( json ) {
   ...
   $(#featuredStoryId).insert(json.getStoryTitle);
   ...
}
</javascript>

but who would be responsible for making that call? how do I get the JSON from the server model? I don’t want to be bound to using ajax requests, I’d just like to have the option to have the content come from different sources, so that the only code that changes is that of fetching the story content, not displaying the content in my component

I know this question is a little broad, but I think that it would really pay off if I could avoid the common solution of something like:

<h1>${featureStory.title}</h1>

Since I’ve always found that to be the most awkward and un-object-oriented portion of the Spring-MVC way of doing things

edit: i’m open to other ideas than just javascript, but what I really want is a view component that can get it’s data from different places where literally the only things that changes is the code that takes data from that source and converts it to the views data model

Answer 1

Using JSP here is standard, you could use JSP to intialize Javascript variables on page load if that’s what you’re looking for