Purpose of servlet dispatcher
In the previous chapter, you learned that RESTful web services are developed on top of the HTTP protocol. Java has a Servlets feature to work with HTTP protocol. Servlets allow you to have path mapping that can work at REST endpoints and provides the HTTP method for identification. It also allows you to form different types of response objects, including JSON and XML. However, it is a crude way of implementing REST endpoints. You have to handle the request URI, parse the parameters, convert JSON/XML, and handle the responses.
Spring MVC comes to your rescue. Spring MVC is based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and has been part of the Spring Framework since its first release. MVC is a well-known design pattern:
- Model: Models are Java objects (POJOs) that contain the application data. They also represent the state of the application.
- View: The view is a presentation layer that consists of HTML/JSP/template files. The view renders...