So I was thinking about enriching/AJAX-ifying my current JSF UI. The data displayed is very complex; the code is getting big and cumbersome, and the size of each page is reaching 100kb. Actions feel very un-responsive and slow, since it takes 2-3 seconds just to download the HTML itself!

One option is to not even do HTML+JS, and use a Swing-based downloadable client UI. Another is to use partial page replacement and keep existing JSF code. Also, I could just use bare-bones DWR and jQuery.

Common things to think about are:

• I have a good POJO model of what the UI is managing, and I want to re-use it
  
• Wherever the POJO model lives, it has to be able to talk to J2EE service beans

A Swing UI would let the model live on client-side JVM, and would require an RPC channel to the J2EE side directly. Promises to be clunky...

I did some quick Googling on DWR and direct JavaScript <-> server-side session POJO interfacing. Looks very cool because of its simplicity. I am comfortable with using jQuery, and its one-liner minimalism could mesh very well with making simple get/set calls to Java model beans. However, as the UI itself gets complex, one-liners get hairy.

JSF with PPR could be nice and easy to add to existing code. But since it will still generate huge amounts of HTML, I wonder if it will stay just as slow. The only way it wouldn't be the case is if JSF only rendered the affected parts of HTML.

Something to ponder...