Understanding the importance 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. Servlets allow you to have path mapping that can work at REST endpoints and provides the HTTP method for identification. Servlets also allow you to form different types of response objects, including JSON and XML. However, they offer a somewhat crude way of implementing REST endpoints, as you must still handle the request URI, parse the parameters, and convert JSON/XML and the responses on your own.

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 (called POJOs) that contain the application data. They also represent the state of the application.
• View: The view is a presentation layer that...