I am wondering whether there is any way to achieve partial JSP rendering in Spring 3 MVC without using AJAX or Tiles?
My web application consists of several JSP pages which are combined together using the <%@ include file="a.jsp"/> directive. What I want is not to load all the data from the server in every request. I know that this is possible with Ajax or Tiles but that requires major refactoring of the application.
If there is such an alternative, how will it behave in terms of performance compared with the standard Ajax approach?
The core technique required for partial page rendering is ajax. There are no alternatives to ajax. You can however throw in an Ajax oriented JavaScript framework like jQuery to simplify Ajax actions and HTML DOM traversions. It should be relatively easy to progressively enhance an existing “legacy” webapplication by just adding the necessary scripts without changing anything of the HTML markup as long as your HTML markup is written in a proper and semantic manner with the right element IDs and class names. Otherwise it’s still just a matter of adding element IDs and class names at the right places.