Chapter 1, Configuring a Spring Development Environment, will give you a quick overview of Spring MVC and guide you with detailed notes of 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, lays 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, the web application context, Spring MVC request flow, and the layered architecture of a typical web application. You will also learn about how to set up the in-memory database for our sample application.

Chapter 3, Control Your Store with Controllers, will take you into the concept of controller; you will learn in detail about defining a controller, how to use URI Template Patterns, Matrix variables and Request parameters.

Chapter 4, Working with Spring Tag Libraries, will show you how to use Spring and Spring-form tag libraries in web form handling. You will learn how to bind the domain objects with the views. You will also learn 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, teaches you the inner mechanics of how InternalResourceViewResolver resolves a view and take you through how to use various view types such as redirect view and static view. You will also learn about Mutipart resolver and content negotiation view resolver. Finally, you will learn how to use Exception handler resolvers.

Chapter 6, Internalize Your Store with Interceptor, presents the concept of the 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 webpage to support internalization with the help of LocaleChangeInterceptor. This chapter also introduces how to do audit logging in a log file using interceptor concept.

Chapter 7, Incorporating Spring Security, gives you an overview of how to incorporate Spring Security framework with Spring MVC. You will learn how to do simple authentication and authorization on a Spring MVC-based web application. 

Chapter 8, Validate Your Products with a Validator, gives you an overview of validation concept. You will learn about bean validation, and you will learn how to perform custom validation along with the standard bean validation that bean validation. You will also learn about classic Spring validation and how to combine it with bean validation.

Chapter 9, Give REST to Your Application with Ajax, teaches you the basic principles of REST and Ajax, And you will learn how to develop application in RESTful services. The basic concept of HTTP verbs and how it is related to standard CRUD operations will be explained, and you will learn how to do fire Ajax requests and how to handle them from a web page.

Chapter 10, Float Your Application with Web Flow, will show you how to use Spring web flow to develop work flow-based web pages. You will learn more about states and transitions in web flow and how to define a flow definition.

Chapter 11, Template with Tiles, teaches you how to decompose a page using Apache tiles; you will learn more about TileViewResolver and how to define reusable Apache tile templates.

Chapter 12, Testing Your Application, introduces 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 how to use it.

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.

Appendix B, Pop Quiz Answers, will provide you with the answers to the Pop quizsections in the book.

To run the examples in the book the following softwares will be required:

The book is for Java developers who want to exploit Spring MVC and its features to build web applications. Some familiarity with basic servlet programming concepts would be a plus, but is not a prerequisite.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Time for action, What just happened?, Pop quiz, and Have a go hero).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a procedure or task, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles 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: "Enter the installed JDK directory path as the variable value; in our case, this would be C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_91. "

A block of code is set as follows:

<%@ taglib prefix="c" 
      uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core"%> 
 
      <!DOCTYPE html> 
      <html lang="en"> 
           <head> 
                <meta charset="utf-8"> 
                <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" 
                 content="IE=edge"> 
                <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, 
                 initial-scale=1">

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<dependency> 
   <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> 
   <artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId> 
   <version>4.2.2.RELEASE</version> 
</dependency>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_91-b15)

 Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.91-b15, mixed mode)

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Java Platform (JDK) 8u91/8u92 download link"

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