Get Started Using Spring MVC

Spring's web MVC framework is, a request-driven web MVC framework, designed around a servlet that dispatches requests to controllers and offers many other functionality for the development of web applications. Spring's DispatcherServlet is completely integrated with the Spring ApplicationContext and allows you to use every other feature of springs as well.

Spring uses a Front Controller like many of the other leading MVC architectures. The Front Controller in Spring is called DispatcherServlet and is declared in the web.xml file. In this example, Spring sets up the following declaration for the DispatcherServlet:

<servlet>
        <servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
            <param-value>/WEB-INF/spring/appServlet/servlet-context.xml</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
		
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

The file includes a basic reference to the servlet class and the configuration file for the servlet located in the /WEB-INF/spring/appServlet/ folder. Unlike other MVC architectures, Spring's dispatcher servlet has full access to the container (i.e., the Spring container)

The servlet-context.xml file contains the Bean properties for the beans that Spring uses to resolve view, locale, theme, and multi-part file resolvers. Most of the time, these beans and their properties are pre-configured for you with the necessary values.