Spring MVC - REST what frontend technology should I choose?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I would like to ask a short question. It is: I want to create some web-application using Spring. I wanted to make RESTful webservice and handle it with HTML5 and jQuery but someone told me that it is stupid idea, wasting my time.

So I would like to know which technology is more used in: companies, by you, programmers in your private projects etc. I have heard about:

• Freemarker
• Velocity
• JSP

And now I am wondering - should I return the view using some template engine from the list above or handle it with JS to present the data on the web and return just JSON from controllers? which way is the best approach?

I am going to create simple Spring, JPA etc. application and develope it by adding more utilities - just to learn java-web-developing for myself :)

Thanks for answers!

manpreet 2 years ago

I would recommend a JSP. You can still use HTML5 and JQuery within the jsp. There are TONS of tutorials out there specific to Spring and JSP.
As to whether to use a returned view or js I would say try both. It depends heavily on how you want your web-app to "act" If you are comfortable with page reloads and redirects... take the view approach. If you prefer not to refresh the whole page, naturally JSON would be the way to go.