Question

I am starting a new web app as a hobby and had a difficulty with the architecture.
The frond end will be HTML and some JavaScript for requests.
And the backend ,will be implemented in Java and using Spring Framework.

Lets say for example a library page where the user can view his books and his personal information.

Personal Info
-------------
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3

I want to implement this features with 2 REST services ,one for the personal information ,and another for the books that the person has.

Ex .
www.mybib.org/users/123/
www.mybib.org/users/123/books/

The thing is ,when a user first request the home page to view his books and his personal information ,how to compose this page.

• Use a servlet / controller who replicate the code of the 2 REST
  services and then redirect to a JSP to format a HTML and JavaScript.
  Once the first load is done, for each update on the page use the Rest
  services .
  I think this is actually very bad design.

• From a servler / controller call the REST services and then call JSP
  in order to compose a HTML and JavaScript output.Then for each update
  call the REST services.

• From a servlet / controller return a HTML layout and make the
  javascript make 2 Ajax request when loading the page.

• …or something else.

As you can see I am pretty new to this and in fact this is actually my first attemp to biuld a very simple web application.

Answer 1

The easiest way is to simply have some kind of IndexController which after, fetching the current users list of books renders the page right away, no extra AJAXy REST calls needed.

If you are new to all of this, that’s how I would start out. You may also want to have a look at the code in the Spring ‘petclinic’ sample application: https://src.springframework.org/svn/spring-samples/petclinic

If you must use Ajax, I’d still have a IndexController and an index.jsp that renders the initial page. After that you javascript code can make the REST calls, for which you implement a different controller.