Book Image

Spring MVC: Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Amuthan Ganeshan
Book Image

Spring MVC: Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: Amuthan Ganeshan

Overview of this book

Spring MVC helps you build flexible and loosely coupled web applications. The Spring MVC Framework is architected and designed in such a way that every piece of logic and functionality is highly configurable. Also, Spring can integrate effortlessly with other popular web frameworks such as Struts, WebWork, Java Server Faces, and Tapestry. The book progressively teaches you to configure the Spring development environment, architecture, controllers, libraries, and more before moving on to developing a full web application. It begins with an introduction to the Spring development environment and architecture so you're familiar with the know-hows. From here, we move on to controllers, views, validations, Spring Tag libraries, and more. Finally, we integrate it all together to develop a web application. You'll also get to grips with testing applications for reliability.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Spring MVC Beginner's Guide - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Understanding flow definitions


A flow definition is composed of a set of states. Each state will have a unique ID in the flow definition. There are five types of state available in Spring Web Flow:

  • start-state: Each flow must have a single start state, which helps in creating the initial state of the flow. Note that if the start-state is not specified, the very first defined state within the flow definition file becomes the start state.

  • action-state: A flow can have many action states; an action-state executes a particular action. An action normally involves interacting with backend services, such as executing some methods in Spring managed beans; Spring Web Flow uses the Spring Expression Language to interact with the backend service beans.

  • view-state: A view-state defines a logical View and Model to interact with the end user. A web flow can have multiple view-states. If the View attribute is not specified, then the ID of the view-state acts as the logical View name.

  • decision-state: This...