Spring MVC: Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Go to the Java SE download page on the Oracle website at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html .

Click on the Java Platform (JDK) 8u91/8u92 download link; this will take you to the license agreement page. Accept the license agreement by selecting the radio button option.

Now, click on the listed download link that corresponds to your Windows operating system architecture; for instance, if your operating system is of type 32 bit, click on the download link that corresponds to Windows x86. If your operating system is of type 64 bit, click on the download link that corresponds to Windows x64.

Now it will start downloading the installer. Once the download is finished, go to the downloaded directory and double-click on the installer. This will open up a wizard window. Just click through the next buttons in the wizard, leaving the default options alone, and click on the Close button at the end of the wizard:

JDK installation wizard

Now you can see the installed JDK directory in the default location; in our case, the default location is C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_60.

Navigate to Start Menu | Settings | System | About | System info | Advanced system settings.

A System Properties window will appear; in this window, select the Advanced tab and click on the Environment Variables button to open the Environment Variables window.

Now, click on the New button in the System variables panel and enter JAVA_HOME as the variable name and enter the installed JDK directory path as the variable value; in our case, this would be C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_91. If you do not have proper rights for the operating system, you will not be able to edit System variables; in that case, you can create the JAVA_HOME variable under the User variables panel.

Now, in the same System variables panel, double-click on the path variable entry; an Edit System Variable window will appear.

Edit Variable value of Path by clicking the new button and enter the following text %JAVA_HOME%\bin as the value.

If you are using a Windows operating system prior to version 10, edit the path variable carefully; you should only append the text at the end of an existing path value. Don't delete or disturb the existing values; make sure you haven't missed the ; (semi-colon) delimited mark as the first letter in the text that you append:

Tip

Now click on the OK button.

Go to Maven's download page at http://maven.apache.org/download.cgi.

Click on the apache-maven-3.3.9-bin.zip download link and start the download.

Once the download is finished, go to the downloaded directory and extract the .zip file into a convenient directory of your choice.

Now we need to create one more environment variable called M2_HOME in a way that is similar to the way in which we created JAVA_HOME. Enter the extracted Maven zip directory's path as the value for the M2_HOME environment variable.

Finally, append the M2_HOME variable to the PATH environment variable as well. Double-click on the path variable and click on the New button to enter %M2_HOME%\bin as the value.

Setting the M2 environment variable

Now we have installed the Maven build tool in our computer. To verify whether our installation has been carried out correctly, we need to follow steps that are similar to the Java installation verification. Open a new command window, type mvn -version and press Enter; you will see the following details of the Maven version:

C:\Users\Amuthan>mvn -version
Apache Maven 3.3.9 (bb52d8502b132ec0a5a3f4c09453c07478323dc5;
    2015-11-10T10:41:47-06:00)
Maven home: C:\Program Files\apache-maven-3.3.9
Java version: 1.8.0_91, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_91\jre
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: Cp1252
OS name: "windows 10", version: "10.0", arch: "amd64", family: "dos"

Go to the Apache Tomcat home page at http://tomcat.apache.org/.

Click on the Tomcat 8.0 download link; it will take you to the download page.

Click on the 32-bit/64-bit Windows Service Installer (pgp, md5, sha1) link; it will start downloading the installer.

Once the download is finished, go to the downloaded directory and double-click on the installer; this will open up a wizard window.

Just click through the Next buttons in the wizard, leaving the default options alone, and click on the Finish button at the end of the wizard. Note that before clicking on the Finish button, just ensure that you have unchecked Run Apache Tomcat checkbox.

Go to the STS download page at http://spring.io/tools/sts/all .

Click on the STS zip link to download the zip file that corresponds to your Windows operating system architecture type (32 bit or 62 bit); this will start the download of the zip file. The STS stable release version at the time of this writing is the STS 3.7.3.RELEASE based on Eclipse 4.6.

Once the download is finished, go to the downloaded directory and extract the .zip file into a convenient directory of your choice.

Open the extracted sts-bundle directory, you will find a directory called sts-3.7.3.RELEASE. Just open that directory and create a desktop shortcut for the STS.exe

Configuring Maven on STS

Configuring Tomcat on STS

Open STS if it is not already open.

Navigate to Window | Preferences | Maven | Installations.

On the right-hand side, you can see the Add button to locate Maven's installation.

Click on the Add button and choose our Maven's installed directory, and then click on the Finish button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Selecting Maven's location during the Maven configuration on STS

Now don't forget to select the newly added Maven installation as your default Maven installation by selecting the checkbox;

Click on the OK button in the Preferences window and close it.

Open STS from the desktop icon, if it is not already open.

Go to the menu bar and navigate to Window | Preferences | Server | Runtime Environments.

You can see the available servers listed on the right panel. Now click on the Add button to add our Tomcat web server.

A wizard window will appear; type tomcat in the Select the type of runtime environment: text box, and a list of available Tomcat versions will be shown. Just select Tomcat v8.0 and select the Create a new local server checkbox. Finally, click on the Next button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Selecting the server type during the Tomcat configuration on STS

In the next window, click on the Browse button and locate Tomcat's installed directory, and then click on the OK button. You can find Tomcat's installed directory under C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 8.0 if you have installed Tomcat in the default location. Then, click on the Finish button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Selecting the Tomcat location during the Tomcat configuration on STS

In STS, navigate to File | New | Project; a New Project wizard window will appear.

Select Maven Project from the list and click on the Next button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Maven project's template selection

Now, a New Maven Project dialog window will appear; just select the checkbox that has the Create a simple project (skip archetype selection) caption and click on the Next button.

The wizard will ask you to specify artifact-related information for your project; just enter Group Id as com.packt and Artifact Id as webstore. Then, select Packaging as war and click on the Finish button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Specifying artifact-related information during the project creation

Open pom.xml; you can find pom.xml under the root directory of the project itself.

You will see some tabs at the bottom of the pom.xml file. Select the Overview tab.

Expand the Properties accordingly and click on the Create button.

Now, an Add property window will appear; enter Name as maven.compiler.source and Value as 1.8, as shown in the following screenshot:

Adding the Java compiler version properties to POM

Similarly, create one more property with Name as maven.compiler.target and Value as 1.8.

Finally, save pom.xml.

Open pom.xml; you can find pom.xml under the root directory of the project itself.

You will see some tabs at the bottom of the pom.xml file. Select the Dependencies tab.

Click on the Add button in the Dependencies section.

A Select Dependency window will appear; enter Group Id as org.springframework, Artifact Id as spring-webmvc, and Version as 4.3.0.RELEASE. Select Scope as compile and then click on the OK button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Adding the spring-webmvc dependency

Similarly, add the dependency for JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) by clicking on the same Add button; this time, enter Group Id as javax.servlet, Artifact Id as jstl, Version as 1.2, and select Scope as compile.

Finally, add one more dependency for servlet-api; repeat the same step with Group Id as javax.servlet, Artifact Id as javax.servlet-api, and Version as 3.1.0, but this time, select Scope as provided and then click on the OK button.

As a last step, don't forget to save the pom.xml file.

Create a webapp/WEB-INF/jsp/ folder structure under the src/main/ folder; create a JSP file called welcome.jsp under the src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsp/ folder, and add the following code snippets into it and save it:

      <%@ 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"> 
           
                <title>Welcome</title> 
           
                <link rel="stylesheet" 
                 href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/
                 bootstrap/3.3.5/css/bootstrap.min.css"> 
           
           </head> 
      
           <body> 
                <div class="jumbotron"> 
                        <h1> ${greeting} </h1> 
                        <p> ${tagline} </p> 
                </div> 
           </body> 
      </html> 

Create a class called HomeController under the com.packt.webstore.controller package in the source directory src/main/java and add the following code into it:

      package com.packt.webstore.controller; 
 
      import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller; 
      import org.springframework.ui.Model; 
      import 
      org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping; 
 
      @Controller 
      public class HomeController { 
 
        @RequestMapping("/") 
        public String welcome(Model model) { 
          model.addAttribute("greeting", "Welcome to Web Store!"); 
          model.addAttribute("tagline", "The one and only amazing 
          web store"); 
 
          return "welcome"; 
        } 
      } 

Create a class called WebApplicationContextConfig under the com.packt.webstore.config package in the source directory src/main/java and add the following code into it:

      package com.packt.webstore.config; 
 
      import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean; 
      import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan; 
      import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration; 
      import 
      org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation
      .DefaultServletHandlerConfigurer; 
      import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation
      .EnableWebMvc; 
      import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation
      .WebMvcConfigurerAdapter; 
      import org.springframework.web.servlet.view
      .InternalResourceViewResolver; 
      import org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView; 
 
      @Configuration 
      @EnableWebMvc 
      @ComponentScan("com.packt.webstore") 
      public class WebApplicationContextConfig extends 
      WebMvcConfigurerAdapter { 
 
           @Override 
          public void configureDefaultServletHandling
          (DefaultServletHandlerConfigurer configurer) { 
              configurer.enable(); 
                               } 
  
          @Bean 
          public InternalResourceViewResolver 
          getInternalResourceViewResolver() { 
              InternalResourceViewResolver resolver = new 
              InternalResourceViewResolver(); 
              resolver.setViewClass(JstlView.class); 
              resolver.setPrefix("/WEB-INF/jsp/"); 
              resolver.setSuffix(".jsp"); 
 
              return resolver; 
          } 
      } 

Create a class called DispatcherServletInitializer under the com.packt.webstore.config package in the source directory src/main/java and add the following code into it:

      package com.packt.webstore.config; 
 
      import org.springframework.web.servlet.support
      .AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer; 
 
      public class DispatcherServletInitializer extends 
      AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer { 
 
           @Override 
           protected Class<?>[] getRootConfigClasses() { 
                return null; 
           } 
 
           @Override 
           protected Class<?>[] getServletConfigClasses() { 
                return new Class[] { 
                WebApplicationContextConfig.class }; 
           } 
 
           @Override 
           protected String[] getServletMappings() { 
                return new String[] { "/" }; 
           } 
      } 

Right-click on your project from Package Explorer and navigate to Run As | Run on Server.

A server selection window will appear with all the available servers listed; just select the server that we have configured, Tomcat v8.0.

At the bottom of the window, you can see a checkbox with the caption that says Always use this server when running this project; select this checkbox and enter the Finish button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Configuring the default server for a Spring MVC project

Now you will see a web page that will show you a welcome message.

Showing the welcome page of the web store