Well the application under consideration here will have no forms, neither will it access any database. It will rather get data from various WS as XML and display the data on screen. There is no transaction involved , and even if it has to go that route it has to go the XML over the wire way.
In that respect would not a Spring MVC be quite heavy because we could leverage the portlet as a controller and from there on just send the call to the ws tier, get the data and display it on front end using light weights like JSON etc?
However to incorporate the bare minimum so that exception handling, localization and other aspects a framework would be helpful....Any pointers to this would be great