This book has a very clear aim: to introduce you to the incredible simplicity and power of Spring MVC. I still remember first learning about the Spring framework back in 2009. The best way to test whether or not you really understand a concept is to try to teach it to someone else. In my case, I have taught Spring MVC to MVC; are you confused? I mean that back in 2009, I taught it to my wife Manju Viswambaran Chandrika (MVC). During that course, I was able to understand the kind of doubts that arise in a beginner's mind. I have gathered all my teaching knowledge and put it in this book in an elegant way so that it can be understood without confusion.
This book follows a theme of developing a simple e-commerce site step-by-step. In every successive chapter, you will learn a new concept of Spring MVC. Obviously, the aim is to teach you how you can use Spring MVC effectively. Developing a full-blown, production-ready e-commerce site is not the purpose of this book.
Chapter 1, Configuring a Spring Development Environment, will give you a quick overview of Spring MVC and its architecture and guide you through detailed notes and step-by-step instructions to set up your development environment. After installing the required prerequisites, you will try out a quick example of how to develop an application with Spring MVC. Although the chapter doesn't explain all the code in detail, you'll pick up a few things intuitively.
Chapter 2, Spring MVC Architecture – Architecting Your Web Store, will lay down the ground work for the sample application that we are going to build along the way, chapter by chapter. This chapter will introduce you to concepts such as request mapping, web application context, Spring MVC request flow, and the layered architecture of a typical web application.
Chapter 3, Control Your Store with Controllers, will take you through the concept of a controller; you will learn more about how to define a controller, and use URI template patterns, matrix variables, and request parameters.
Chapter 4, Working with Spring Tag Libraries, will teach you how to use Spring and Spring form tag libraries in web form handling. You will learn how to bind domain objects with views and how to use message bundles to externalize label caption texts. At the end of this chapter, you will see how to add a login form.
Chapter 5, Working with View Resolver, will present the inner mechanics of how InternalResourceViewResolver resolves a view and takes you through how to use various view types, such as redirect view and static view. You will also learn about the multipart resolver and content negotiation view resolver. Finally, you will learn how to use exception handler resolvers.
Chapter 6, Intercept Your Store with Interceptor, will present the concept of an interceptor to you. You will learn how to leverage the interceptor to handle or transform requests and responses flexibly. This chapter will teach you how to make your web page support internalization with the help of LocaleChangeInterceptor. This chapter also introduces how to perform audit logging in a log file using the interceptor concept.
Chapter 7, Validate Your Products with a Validator, will give you an overview of the validation concept. You will learn about bean validation, and you will learn how to perform custom validation along with the standard bean validation. You will also learn about the classic Spring validation and how to combine it with bean validation.
Chapter 8, Give REST to Your Application with Ajax, will teach you the basic principles of REST and Ajax. You will learn how to develop an application in RESTful services. The basic concept of HTTP verbs and how they are related to standard CRUD operations will be explained, and you will learn how to fire an Ajax request and handle it from a web page.
Chapter 9, Apache Tiles and Spring Web Flow in Action, will teach you how to use the Spring web flow to develop workflow-based web pages. You will learn more about states and transitions in web flow and how to define a flow definition. This chapter also teaches you how to decompose a page using Apache tiles. You will also learn more about TileViewResolver and how to define reusable Apache tiles templates.
Chapter 10, Testing your Application, will teach you how to leverage the Spring testing capability to test your controllers. You will learn how to load the test context and how to mock the service and repository layers. This chapter also introduces you to the Spring MVC test module and teaches you how to use that.
Appendix A, Using the Gradle Build Tool, introduces you to using the Gradle build tool for our sample application. You will learn about the Gradle script that is required to build our project using Gradle build tool.
To run the examples in the book, the following software will be required:
Java SE Development Kit 7u45 or newer
Maven 3.1.0
Apache Tomcat 7.0
STS 3.4.0 release (Spring Tool Suite)
This book is designed to be followed from beginning to end, although those with existing knowledge of Spring MVC will be able to jump in to the later chapters and pick out things that are important to them. You are not expected to be experienced with the Spring framework. Some knowledge of servlet programming and dependency injection will be helpful but not essential. In a nutshell, the book provides clear pictures, illustrations, concepts, and is ideally suited for beginners and intermediate developers.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Action 1
Action 2
Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These are short multiple-choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
These practical challenges give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Once the download is finished, go to the downloaded directory and extract the .zip file into a convenient directory of your choice."
A block of code is set as follows:
<body>
<section>
<div class="jumbotron">
<div class="container">
<h1> ${greeting} </h1>
<p> ${tagline} </p>
</div>
</div>
</section>
</body>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<servlet>
<servlet-name>DefaultServlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class> org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet </servlet-class>
</servlet>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
C:\>mvn -version Apache Maven 3.2.1 (ea8b2b07643dbb1b84b6d16e1f08391b666bc1e9; 2014-02-14T12:37:52-05:00) Maven home: C:\Program Files\apache-maven-3.2.1 Java version: 1.7.0_51, vendor: Oracle Corporation Java home: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_51\jre Default locale: en_SG, platform encoding: Cp1252 OS name: "windows 7", version: "6.1", arch: "amd64", family: "windows"
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "A System Properties window will appear; in this window, select the Advanced tab and click on the Environment Variables button to open the environment variables window."
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