Any one who are in java world know more or less about Spring MVC. In this article we will create very basic Spring MVC project by Maven. This is just a quick start guide for those who want to starts Spring MVC. However learning Maven is not the scope of this article.
[example title=”Prerequisites “]
To follow this article you should have basic knowledge of Java Web Application and Maven
[/example]
Step 1: Open your command prompt and execute the below command
[example title=”All Should Go in Single Line”]
mvn archetype:generate
-DgroupId=com.proliferay
-DartifactId=HelloWorldSpring
-DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp
-DinteractiveMode=false
[/example]
Note 1: Once the above command is executed it will create below project structure
Note 2: The above project is a simple java web application and its not a spring project. Below steps will make it Spring MVC project
Step 2: Add Spring Dependency in pom.xml
[example title=”pom.xml”]
<project xmlns=”http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0″ xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
xsi:schemaLocation=”http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd”>
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>com.proliferay</groupId>
<artifactId>HelloWorldSpring</artifactId>
<packaging>war</packaging>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<name>HelloWorldSpring Maven Webapp</name>
<url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
<properties>
<spring.version>4.0.1.RELEASE</spring.version>
</properties>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>junit</groupId>
<artifactId>junit</artifactId>
<version>3.8.1</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<!– Spring dependencies –>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
<build>
<finalName>HelloWorldSpring</finalName>
</build>
</project>
[/example]
Step 3: Configure dispatcher servlet in web.xml
[example title=”web.xml”]
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
xmlns=”http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee”
xsi:schemaLocation=”http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd”
id=”WebApp_ID” version=”3.0″>
<display-name>Spring Hello World Example</display-name>
<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>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>
[/example]
Note 3: Every Spring MVC Project must have DispatcherServlet. Its a front controller in Spring Framework. Every requests goes through this front controller.
Note 4: Look back Step 3. We have given name of the dispatcher servlet as dispatcher. So by default it will try to load dispatcher-servlet.xml file under WEB-INF directory. Similarly if the name of the dispatcher servlet is foo then it will try to load foo-servlet.xml and so on.
Step 4: Create dispatcher-servlet.xml in WEB-INF directory
[example title=”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:context=”http://www.springframework.org/schema/context”
xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-4.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-4.0.xsd”>
<context:component-scan base-package=”com.proliferay.controller” />
<bean
class=”org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver”>
<property name=”prefix”>
<value>/WEB-INF/views/</value>
</property>
<property name=”suffix”>
<value>.jsp</value>
</property>
</bean>
</beans>
[/example]
Note 5: In Spring controller we generally return logical name of the views. For example if a controller return a string “hello” then spring will try to resolve this logical view to physical file. On the basis of the above configuration in Step 4 it will look for hello.jsp under /WEB-INF/views. Similarly if the controller returns a string “helloworld” then it will look for helloworld.jsp /WEB-INF/views and so on.
Step 5: Create views folder under WEB-INF. The views folder contains helloworld.jsp
[example title=”helloworld.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>HelloWorld Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<center>
<h2>Hello World Page</h2>
</center>
</body>
</html>
[/example]
Step 6: Add index page under webapp
[example title=”index.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>Index Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<center>
<h2>Hello World</h2>
<h3>
<a href=”hello”>Show Hello World Page</a>
</h3>
</center>
</body>
</html>
[/example]
Step 7: Add the controller
[example title=”HelloWorldController.java”]
package com.proliferay.controller;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
/**
*
* @author Hamidul Islam
*
*/
@Controller
public class HelloWorldController {
@RequestMapping(“/hello”)
public String showHelloPage() {
System.out.println(“#############showHelloPage method#############”);
/**
* Spring will display helloworld.jsp under /WEB-INF/views
*/
return “helloworld”;
}
}
[/example]
Running the example:
Download the source code from the below link and create the war file of the project by below command
mvn clean package
