Using URI template patterns

In the previous chapters, you saw how to map a particular URL to a Controller's method; for example, if we entered the URL http://localhost:8080/webstore/market/products, we would map that request to the list method of ProductController and list all the product information in the web page.

What if we want to list only a subset of products based on category, for instance, if we want to display only the products that fall under the category of laptops? If the URL entered is http://localhost:8080/webstore/market/products/Laptop, and similarly if the URL is http://localhost:8080/webstore/market/products/Tablet, we will like to show only tablets on the web page.

One way to do this is to have a separate request mapping method in the Controller for every unique category. But it won't scale if we have hundreds of categories; in that case we have to write hundreds of request mapping methods in the Controller. So how do we do that in an elegant way?

The Spring MVC...