Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Spring MVC HelloWorld Application
This tutorial walks through setting up a Spring MVC environment with Eclipse, Tomcat, and JDK, importing required JARs, configuring web.xml and springmvc.xml, writing a HelloWorld controller, creating JSP views, and handling common issues such as static resource mapping and server integration.
Preface: After a twelve‑year wait, the Chinese women’s volleyball team’s triumphant victory is likened to a programmer’s exhilaration when a stubborn bug is finally solved, inspiring the author to study Spring MVC in depth.
What is Spring MVC? Spring MVC is the web‑application module of the Spring Framework, providing a full‑featured Model‑View‑Controller architecture that can be used alone or integrated with other MVC frameworks such as Struts.
Software parameters used in this tutorial:
Eclipse Mars.1 Release (4.5.1)
Tomcat 8.0.36
JDK 1.8.0_60
Spring Framework 4.0.4.RELEASE
Creating the project: In Eclipse choose File → New → Other → Dynamic Web Project. The resulting directory structure is shown in the accompanying screenshots.
Importing required JARs: Place the following Spring and utility JARs into WEB-INF/lib:
spring-aop-4.0.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-beans-4.0.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-context-4.0.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-core-4.0.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-expression-4.0.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-web-4.0.4.RELEASE.jar
spring-webmvc-4.0.4.RELEASE.jar
commons-logging-1.1.1.jarConfiguration files and code:
web.xml (under WEB-INF)
<?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_2_5.xsd"
id="WebApp_ID" version="2.5">
<!-- Configure DispatcherServlet -->
<servlet>
<servlet-name>springDispatcherServlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>classpath:springmvc.xml</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>springDispatcherServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>springmvc.xml (under src)
<?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"
xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
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-4.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-4.0.xsd">
<!-- Scan the controller package -->
<context:component-scan base-package="com.jackie.springmvc"/>
<!-- View resolver: prefix + view name + suffix -->
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
<property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/views/"/>
<property name="suffix" value=".jsp"/>
</bean>
</beans>HelloWorld.java (package com.jackie.springmvc.handlers)
package com.jackie.springmvc.handlers;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
@Controller
public class HelloWorld {
/**
* 1. Map the request URL with @RequestMapping.
* 2. The returned string is resolved by the view resolver as prefix+returnVal+suffix.
*/
@RequestMapping("/helloworld")
public String hello(){
System.out.println("hello world");
return "success";
}
}index.jsp (under WebContent)
<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
<!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=UTF-8">
<title>Insert title here</title>
</head>
<body>
<a href="helloworld">hello world</a>
</body>
</html>success.jsp (under WEB-INF/views)
<%@ 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>Insert title here</title>
</head>
<body>
<h4>Success Page</h4>
</body>
</html>Additional notes:
1. Adding Tomcat server – Download Tomcat, add it in Eclipse via Window → Preferences → Server → Runtime Environments , then add the server runtime to the project’s build path (Project → Properties → Java Build Path → Libraries → Add Library → Server Runtime).
2. Serving static resources – Because the servlet mapping / intercepts all requests, static files (css, js, images, html) return 404. To allow them, add default servlet mappings in web.xml for each file type, e.g.:
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.css</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
... (repeat for *.gif, *.jpg, *.js, *.html) ...After adding these mappings, static resources are correctly served, and the view resolver can also be configured to return other file types such as .jpg by changing the suffix property.
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Java Captain
Focused on Java technologies: SSM, the Spring ecosystem, microservices, MySQL, MyCat, clustering, distributed systems, middleware, Linux, networking, multithreading; occasionally covers DevOps tools like Jenkins, Nexus, Docker, ELK; shares practical tech insights and is dedicated to full‑stack Java development.
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