Well, my question may sound a little bit fuzzy, but here it is, anyways. I'm building a web application using Spring MVC 3.1.M1, JSP 2.1 (without Tiles, I use plain JSP tag files to compose my layouts).
Basically, my pages are built using layouts of some common parts - header, footer, banner, menu etc. Most of these parts are dynamic, i.e. contain current user's related information.
JSP does not have a "component" notion, so I cannot define part of my template and its backing java code in some one place, coupled together. In my @Controllers, I have to fully populate my model, including data for header, footer, menu and other stuff. What I really want to do is to avoid this code duplication. Abstract BaseController class with some generic model population methods does not look good too.
JSP and Spring MVC are a very often used together, so I expect some best-practices to exist on this subject. Lets discuss this.