Some of my learning notes about using the excellent Spring MVC framework to build a simple MVC based web application. Spring MVC is an action oriented framework. For a good overview on the differences between UI Component and Action oriented frameworks checkout this link.

In action oriented MVC land, the controller dispatches to a specific action, based on information in the request. Each action does a specific thing to transform the request and take action on it, possibly updating the model tier. This approach does not try to hide the request/response model of the underlying HTTP, and it also says absolutely nothing about the specifics of the HTML/CSS/JS comprising the UI.

View Resolvers

Once Spring’s DispatcherServlet servlet is registered, Spring provides the concept of resolvers, and more specifically view resolvers, which provide a view agnostic way of rendering object models (e.g. could be JSPs, Velocity or even XSLT). Here’s a simple example. UrlViewResolver is a simple convention based resolver which works if URI path names match up with the actual view names.

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

If I requested http://tehhost/bar/resistor and a controller action was wired up, a JSP called resistor.jsp within /WEB-INF/jsp/ would be used.

Its interested to note that multiple view resolvers can be daisy chained together.

Static Files

A common requirement is to serve up static web assets such as images, stylesheet and/or scripts. Spring makes this fairly straightforward:

web.xml

<web-app version="2.5" 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_2_5.xsd">    
  <display-name>ohai spring mvc</display-name>
  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>helloServlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
      <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
      <param-value>/WEB-INF/config/servlet-config.xml</param-value>
    </init-param>
  </servlet>
  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>helloServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/content/**</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

servlet-config.xml define an mvc:resources servlet config element. Double asterisk (**) recurses within the location.

<mvc:annotation-driven />
<mvc:resources location="content" mapping="/content/**" />
<context:component-scan base-package="net.bencode.controllers" />
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver" p:prefix="/WEB-INF/jsp/" p:suffix=".jsp" />

Tags

spring.tld

When using JSPs as the chosen view technology, Spring provides tags for evaluating errors, setting themes and outputting internationalized messages.

bind escapeBody hasBindErrors htmlEscape message nestedPath theme transform url eval

spring-form.tld

servlet-config.xml

<bean id="messageSource" class="org.springframework.context.support.ResourceBundleMessageSource" p:basename="messages" />

resources/messages.properties

goal.text=How many minutes did you pump your guns for today?

hello.jsp

<ul>
  <li><spring:message code="goal.text" /><form:input path="minutes" /></li>
  <li><input type="submit" value="Enter Exercise" /></li>

Session

Server side session can automagically maintained by specifying both the @SessionAttributes (to define what the session tracked variable is called) and @ModelAttribute (to define what the session varible is, that is its type, and where it is coming from, that is its source) annotations, for example:

@Controller
@SessionAttributes("proteinPowder")
public class ProteinPowderController {

  @Autowired
  private ProteinPowderService proteinPowderService;

  @RequestMapping(value = "addPowder", method = RequestMethod.GET)
  public String addPowder(Model model, HttpSession session) {
    Goal goal = (Goal)session.getAttribute("proteinPowder");

    if (goal == null) {
      goal = new Goal();
      p.setName("Donkey Kong 5000");
      p.setGramsPer30g(26);
      p.setCostPerKilogram(34);
    }

    model.addAttribute("proteinPowder", p);
    return "addPowder";
  }
  
  @RequestMapping(value = "addPowder", method = RequestMethod.POST)
  public String updatePowder(@Valid @ModelAttribute("proteinPowder") Powder p, BindingResult result) {

    if(result.hasErrors()) {
      return "addPowder";
    }
    else {
        proteinPowderService.save(p);
    }
    
    return "redirect:index.jsp";
  }

Interceptors

Registered in the request lifecycle. They provide pre and post processing hooks into the web request pipeline. A bit like HttpModules in ASP.NET. Callbacks are used to override or modify state.

<mvc:interceptors>
  <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.LocaleChangeInterceptor" p:paramName="language" /> 
</mvc:interceptors>

REST

Requesting content in varying formats, for example, application/pdf, text/xml or even text/json requires content negotiation to be performed. This is where Spring’s ContentNegotiationViewResolver comes in handy. It simply defines content rules (based on the resource extension or the Accept HTTP header), and based on the content type deemed suitable will delegate the rendering work to the most appropriate view resolver. In short, it routes view resolvers based on the desired content. Here’s an example of how to configure it.

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.ContentNegotiatingViewResolver">
  <property name="mediaTypes">
    <map>
      <entry key="atom" value="application/atom+xml"/>
      <entry key="html" value="text/html"/>
      <entry key="json" value="application/json"/>
    </map>
  </property>
  <property name="viewResolvers">
    <list>
      <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.BeanNameViewResolver"/>
      <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
        <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/"/>
        <property name="suffix" value=".jsp"/>
      </bean>
    </list>
  </property>
  <property name="defaultViews">
    <list>
      <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.json.MappingJackson2JsonView" />
    </list>
  </property>
</bean>

<bean id="content" class="com.springsource.samples.rest.SampleContentAtomView"/>

A nice little Spring tag to avoid hardcoding/managing REST endpoints in scripts, is the url tag. For example, consider this jQuery snippet:

$.getJSON(
  '<spring:url value="powders.json" />', 
  { ajax: true }, 
  function(data) { }
);