Spring MVC uses a modified version of the Model 2 Front Controller architecture. Before we go into details about how Spring MVC works, we will focus on creating a few simple web flows using Spring MVC. In this section, we will create six typical web application flows using Spring MVC. The flows are listed as follows:
- Flow 1: Controller without a View; serving content on its own
- Flow 2: Controller with a View (a JSP)
- Flow 3: Controller with a View and using ModelMap
- Flow 4: Controller with a View and using ModelAndView
- Flow 5: Controller for a simple form
- Flow 6: Controller for a simple form with validation
At the end of every flow, we will discuss how to unit test the Controller.
Before we start with the first flow, we would need to get the application set up to use Spring MVC. In the next section, we will start by understanding how to set up Spring MVC in a web application.
We are using Maven to manage our dependencies. The following steps are involved in setting up a simple...