Creating a web user interface

[SpontaneousOrder]

JSR-356 & 353 (WebSockets & JSON) might be of interest, instead of Ajax. You can keep a socket open for the whole session and just pass javascript messages back and forth. A few annotations and you're good to go.
They're part of the JEE standard now.

[doodab]

JSR-356 & 353 (WebSockets & JSON) might be of interest, instead of Ajax. You can keep a socket open for the whole session and just pass javascript messages back and forth. A few annotations and you're good to go.
They're part of the JEE standard now.

I planned to just have standard spring MVC controller behind the rest URLs returning JSON to the ajax requests for now.

I've managed to persuade client co to give me a couple of weeks to spend on the whole project so I might look at websockets and single page apps and loads of slick stuff later but I don't want to have too much to learn and I still have to spec and write the API module and a templating system for creating new "applications" on the platform yet. That is the bulk of the work as it needs to programatically create and deploy resources into the container depending on the template.