Spring MVC Hello World Example

In this example show how to write a simple web based Hello World application using Spring MVC framework. To start with it, let us have working with STS IDE in place and follow the following steps to develop a Dynamic Web Application using Spring Web MVC Framework:

Step 1: Create a Dynamic Web Project with a name SpringMVCHelloWeb and create a package com.dineshonjava.controller under the src folder in the created project.

Step 2: Add below mentioned Spring 3.0 libraries and other libraries into the folder WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib. 

/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/commons-fileupload-1.1.1.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/commons-io-1.2.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/commons-logging-1.1.1.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/hibernate-validator-4.0.2.GA.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/jstl-1.2.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/log4j-1.2.14.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/servlet-2.3.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-api-1.5.6.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/slf4j-log4j12-1.5.6.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/spring-asm-3.0.3.RELEASE.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/spring-beans-3.0.3.RELEASE.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/spring-context-3.0.3.RELEASE.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/spring-core-3.0.3.RELEASE.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/spring-expression-3.0.3.RELEASE.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/spring-web-3.0.3.RELEASE.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/spring-webmvc-3.0.3.RELEASE.jar
/SpringMVCHelloWorld/WebRoot/WEB-INF/lib/validation-api-1.0.0.GA.jar

Step 3: Create a Java class HelloWorldController under the com.dineshonjava.controller package.

Step 4: Create Spring configuration files Web.xml and sdnext-servlet.xml under the WebRoot/WEB-INF/ folder.

Step 5: Create a sub-folder with a name views under the WebRoot/WEB-INF folder. Create a view file hello.jsp under this sub-folder.

Step 6: The final step is to create the content of all the source and configuration files name sdnext-servlet.xml under the sub-folder WebRoot/WEB-INF/config and export the application as explained below.

Software versions used to run the sample code:

• Spring 3.0
• Java 1.6
• Tomcat 7
• JSTL 1.2
• STS Java EE IDE

Web Application Structure:

Here is the content of HelloWorldController.java file

package com.dineshonjava.controller;

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

/**
 * @author Dinesh Rajput
 *
 */
@Controller
@RequestMapping("/hello")
public class HelloWorldController {
 
   @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET)
   public String sayHelloWorld(ModelMap model) {
     model.addAttribute("message", "Spring 3.0 MVC Framework Hello World Example!");
     model.addAttribute("auther", "DineshOnJava");
     return "hello";
   }
}

Following is the content of Spring Web configuration file web.xml

<web-app id="WebApp_ID" version="3.0" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" 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">
  <display-name>SpringMVCHelloWorld</display-name>
        <welcome-file-list>
  <welcome-file>/</welcome-file>
 </welcome-file-list>
 
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>sdnext</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>
            org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
        </servlet-class>
      <init-param>
            <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name><param-value>/WEB-INF/config/sdnext-servlet.xml</param-value></init-param>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>sdnext</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

Following is the content of another Spring Web configuration file sdnext-servlet.xml

<beans xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context" xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc" xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xsi:schemalocation="
 http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
 http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
 http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
 http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
 http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc
 http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd">

<!-- Enable annotation driven controllers, validation etc... -->
<mvc:annotation-driven></mvc:annotation-driven>

<context:component-scan base-package="com.dineshonjava.controller">
</context:component-scan>

  <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver" id="viewResolver">
  <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/views/"></property>
  <property name="suffix" value=".jsp"></property>
  </bean>

</beans>

Following is the content of Spring view file hello.jsp

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
    pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>

<html>
 <head>
  
  <title>Spring 3.0 MVC Hello World Example</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  <h2>
${message}</h2>
<h2>
${auther}</h2>
</body>
</html>

Once you are done with creating source and configuration files, export your application. Right click on your application and use Export -> WAR File option and save your SpringMVCHelloWorld.war file in Tomcat's webapps folder.

Now start your Tomcat server and make sure you are able to access other web pages from webapps folder using a standard browser. Now try to access the URL http://localhost:8080/sdnext/hello and if everything is fine with your Spring Web Application, you should see the following result:


You should note that in the given URL, sdnext is the application name and hello is the virtual subfolder which we have mentioned in our controller using @RequestMapping("/hello"). You can use direct root while mapping your URL using @RequestMapping("/"), in this case you can access the same page using short URL http://localhost:8080/sdnext / but it is advised to have different functionalities under different folders.

Download Source Code
SpringMVCHelloWorld.zip