I want to add one thing for the splashing water, what you're describing sounds like the ocean or pond...

both the ocean and ponds come with wake emitters

and the great thing about using these is that you can key frame the emitters negative or positive values to come up with various results like something splashing in the water... key framing with a sin wave will help give that effect, it just takes some tweaking to get it to look right...

The pond is just a 2D fluid container with the height field checked and some other tweaks, so the emitter is just added in via the pond portion of the menu...

for the ocean shader, when you create wakes, it automatically creats both the fluid container and the emitter. you can create 2 types of wakes with this, one creates waves the other creates foam...for your effect, use the waves... and you can play around with those and see what kind of effects you get

take some things that graphik said in his post and use wake emitters with them.... you can also use coloratpoint to help emit particles on various splashes and the sort

now use caution when using wakes with ocean... scaling is ok, but you have to set the resolution so that the voxels remain square, anything else and you'll have stretched out wakes that look aweful...

Start with wakes and go from there...