Spring 3.2 MVC Hello World Example

In this section, you will learn about Hello World example in Spring 3.2.

Spring 3.2 is a open source application framework based on Java platform. Spring MVC is the Spring's web framework.
Given below a basic tutorial for displaying a "hello world" message in Spring 3.2. This will help you understanding the basic configuration for Spring MVC :

The project structure of this example is given below :

The list of the jar file used in this example is given below :

commons-logging-1.1.1.jar
jstl-1.2.jar
spring-beans-3.2.0.RELEASE.jar
spring-context-3.2.0.RELEASE.jar
spring-core-3.2.0.RELEASE.jar
spring-expression-3.2.0.RELEASE.jar
spring-web-3.2.0.RELEASE.jar
spring-webmvc-3.2.0.RELEASE.jar

First you need to configure web.xml as follows :

web.xml( Spring3.2HelloWorld/WebContent/WEB-INF/web.xml )

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
version="3.0">
	<display-name>Spring3.2HelloWorld</display-name>
	<welcome-file-list>
		<welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
	</welcome-file-list>
	
	<servlet>
		<servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
		<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
		<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
	</servlet>
	
	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>*.html</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>

</web-app>

As you can see the welcome file is "index.jsp", it means it will be the first page, which will show to you. The DispatcherServlet is configured with <servlet-name> "dispatcher". You can choose any name for <servlet-name>. Once it will initialize, it will search for a configuration file <servlet-name>-servlet.xml or dispatcher-servlet.xml in WEB-INF folder of web application. This fill is necessary to configure your MVC application. The dispatcher-servlet.xml used in this example is given below :

dispatcher-servlet.xml( Spring3.2HelloWorld/WebContent/WEB-INF/dispatcher-servlet.xml )

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd">
	<context:component-scan base-package="net.roseindia.spring3point2.controller" />
	
	<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.UrlBasedViewResolver">
		<property name="viewClass"
		value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView" />
		<property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/" />
		<property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
	</bean>
</beans>

The <context:component-scan> tag scans the classpath for annotated components that will be auto-registered as Spring beans. UrlBasedViewResolver resolver is configured to resolve the views.

The first page that will appear to you is "index.jsp", its code is given below :

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Index or Home Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<a href="welcome/hello.html"><i>Click here to print message</i></a>
</body>
</html>

All the request having URL pattern "*.html" is handled by the controller HelloWorldController.java, the code of this controller is given below :

HelloWorldController.java(Spring3.2HelloWorld/src/net/roseindia/spring3point2/controller/HelloWorldController.java)

package net.roseindia.spring3point2.controller;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.ui.ModelMap;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/welcome")
public class HelloWorldController {
	@RequestMapping("/hello.html")
	public String sayHello(ModelMap model) {
		model.addAttribute("message", "Spring 3.2 MVC Hello World");
		return "hello";	
	}
}

In the above controller, you can see that the request through URL "/welcome/hello.html" is handled by the method sayHello(). This method will return string "hello" which is resolved by the view resolver configured in dispatcher-servlet.xml and it will look for hello.jsp file in "/WEB-INF/jsp/hello.jsp".

The code for the hello.jsp is given below :

hello.jsp(Spring3.2HelloWorld/WebContent/WEB-INF/jsp/hello.jsp)

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Spring 3.2 Hello World</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2><i>${message}</i></h2>
</body>
</html>

Spring 3.2 MVC Hello World Example

Spring 3.2 MVC Hello World Example

Spring 3.2 MVC Hello World Example

OUTPUT

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