Does Spring MVC 3.x support partial views (html/jsp) like that of ASP.NET MVC3/4?

Question

Q1: Does Spring or any opensource java UI framework support partial views like that in asp.net mvc?

For example in my main index.html (or _layout.cshtm per asp.net mvc3 spec)

I would have the folllowing code:

<span id="logindisplay">@Html.Partial("_LogOnPartial")</span>

where @Html is a helper to display a partial view for _LogonPartial.cshtml which just injected it's html view contents into the page?

Q2: If this is supposed If I want to display a bunch of partial views it would be helpful to display them concurrently in parallel to improve performance. Very similar to what linkedin is doing using dust and fizzy? http://engineering.linkedin.com/profile/engineering-new-linkedin-profile

Q3: Is fizzy available as open source like that of dust?

Answer 1

If you want to include content of a page into another page, by adding some code on the page itself, you should compare asp with jsp, not ASP.NET MVC* with JEE - Spring MVC

So, an equivalent to <span id="logindisplay">@Html.Partial("_LogOnPartial")</span> on a jsp would be one / all of the following

1. On your jsp, include content from another jsp using <%@ include file="../includes/inner-content.jsp" %>. This is what is called a static include. The source of the included jsp is included and made part of the parent jsp, before the jsp is compiled. If you use an IDE, it will check to ensure the included jsp does infact exist at the path specified, relative to the location of the jsp in which you are adding the include. Technically this is a JSP Directive. The jsp being included could just be a fragment, and not addressable from the outside world (could be hidden inside WEB-INF)

2. You can also use what's called a Dynamic include <jsp:include page="someJSP.jsp" />. In this case, the included JSP should be addressable from the browser and should be capable of being rendered independently. When the server is executing the servlet to render the parent JSP, it stops when this tag is seen, and starts executing the servlet for the included jsp, the output obtained from the inner jsp execution is then merged to the output of the parent jsp, and processing of the parent jsp is resumed.

3. A third option would be to use Core JSTL taglib's <c:import url=""/>. This works just like option 2 above, except it also allows you to import a page / content from a url that lives outside your application. Basically you can mention a path to a jsp, or relative URI to a servlet mapping in your application, or a URL to an external page.

Now, I suspect this is not really what you want to do, if you are comparing with what Linkedin is doing. You want to mashup content from sources in your own application, and compose your page. You also want to do this in an asynch manner so as to keep load times in check. In this case, you HAVE to use JavaScript and Ajax. All the mechanisms described above are for server rendered pages (All HTML is created before the page is rendered in the browser). Just like @HTML. You need to create a simple framework / use an existing one, where once a page loads, it fires asynch ajax calls to the server to get content for specific areas on the page and renders the returned HTML in those specific areas.

Hope this helps.

Do let me know if I've misunderstood your question.