Preface

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.

It has been more than two years since the first edition of this book presented readers with a beginner-friendly way of explaining the concepts of Spring MVC. The popular reception of the book and the rapid development of the Spring MVC framework naturally demands a new edition.

In the two years since the first edition of this book was published I have received all kinds of suggestions from readers how it could be improved. With the aid of all this information I have completely revised the book. The most obvious changes in this second edition are usage of the latest and greatest versions of Spring and other libraries.

The examples in this book are completely rewritten using Spring 4.3.0.RELEASE version with Java-based configuration. Also in this edition we incorporated the popular in-memory database (HSQL DB) as our backend data-store for the example project. Though this edition includes many changes, my main audience remains the beginners.

I hope you will find this second edition more useful for learning Spring MVC thoroughly from a beginner's perspective.