It works really nice with Rails because of how easy Rails makes it return a piece of javascript to the page (this is called SJR) so there is some magic included for making form submissions work which is part of the Rails turbolinks gem. The javascript that the server returns to the page essentially calls Turbolinks.visit("/url-form-submission-would-redirect-to-after-completion") so that the expected navigation takes place. It's quite clever. I think you would have to replicate that in the Java world to get the full experience. This SO answer alludes to how you might replicate SJR https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26750738/java-spring-ret...
So I think out of the box you can expect clicking links to work (and that alone provides a great speedup), but ajax form submissions will require some work. If you look at some articles on how form submissions with turbolinks make use of SJR you could likely figure it out and implement it. It's overall not a very complicated mechanism.
I suppose Rails .erb templating engine also has some helpers which the form submission side of turbolinks relies on. Namely it includes a data attribute data-remote and that's the thing turbolinks hooks into to prevent the default behavior of the form submission and and instead fire the ajax request. In theory so long as your forms include that it will work if you have the SJR stuff in place on your back-end.
You could definitely roll full support for it.
Various page transitions can be set using `defaultPageTransition`: https://demos.jquerymobile.com/1.4.5/transitions/
Click the "page" button to the right of a transition for a demo.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/beforeun...
Funny thing, you can actually serve each page as a separate, stand-alone JS "app/page" and still get this benefit (e.g. each page in your app becomes separate webpack entry point).
Then I realized we could do that easily with a JS library! We could give some divs a "sticky-id" attribute, so they stay as part of the DOM tree when the page reloads, only their contents get replaced with the contents of divs from the new page having the same "sticky-id". That way there's no flash to white, and CSS transitions on sticky elements get a chance to fire. The whole thing could be handled by a generic onclick handler on each link. And the links would support opening in new tab as well, the JS would only fire when they are clicked in the same tab. I think that would be the most conservative way to have an SPA-like experience with a minimum of JS. Unfortunately I was too lazy to implement it :-/
EDIT: It's interesting that most replies to this comment seem to talk about whole page transitions, like fading out the whole page. But as I envisioned it, the key part of the idea is that we can get element-by-element transitions without writing custom JS, just by adding "sticky-id" attribute to some elements and letting their CSS transitions do the work.