Advice on front end implementation of rich client web app based on ASP.NET MVC2

Question

We use MVC2 to build up our web app. There are some complicated pages in our project. They have plenty of user interactivities, realtime stock data and charts, requiring no page refresh.

I am new to front end development and ASP.NET MVC2. After using it for a while I think it's a form-based framework for presentation layer(I maybe wrong). If most UI actions are excuted inside one web page, using ajax and javascript to render data and run UI logic seems better.

Then I find there're two way to rendering UI in our app: binding UI model to View using MVC2 and filling the view using javascript. This seems not so elegant or may possibly mess if more and more views are implemented.

It seems MVC2 controller is good at being RESTful UI model data provider. So I think make the solution as Controller(model data)->HTML layouts + javascript(ui logic) could be a good way to implement such a rich client web app. Is it a good practice to do? Or what's your advice on this kind of project? Are there any web resources(articles or sample projects) for reference?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

It's not a bad practice to make your actions return just data, you could make your actions return JSon objects since they are lightweight and use JSonP to make ajax request across different domains. You can try the new template JQuery PlugIn to render your views.

Answer 2

My suggestion would be to build up your application such that it works without JavaScript. Then use JQuery (a JavaScript library) and Ajax to improve the user experience.

Be aware that it is entirely possible that your RIA needs go beyond what one can do with Jquery. In these scenarios one might consider another solution (HTML5, SilverLight, Flash, etc.). Or you could tone down your RIA needs.