Spring MVC Beginner's Guide

Go to the Java SE download page on the Oracle website by entering the following URL in your browser: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html.

Click on the Java platform JDK 7 download link; this will take you to the license agreement page. Accept the license agreement by selecting that option in radio button.

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. Or, 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 the following wizard window; just click on the Next button 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\jdk1.7.0_25.

Navigate to Control Panel | System | 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, enter JAVA_HOME as the variable name, and enter the installed JDK directory path as the variable value; in our case, this is C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_51. In case 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.

Setting PATH Environment variable

Edit Variable value of Path by appending the ;%JAVA_HOME%\bin text to its existing value.

Now click on the OK button.

Go to Maven's download page by entering the following URL on your browser:

http://maven.apache.org/download.cgi

Click on the apache-maven-3.2.1-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.

Create one more environment variable, called M2, with the value %M2_HOME%\bin, as shown in the following screenshot:

Setting the M2 environment variable

Finally append the M2 variable to the PATH environment variable as well by simply appending the;%M2% text to the PATH variable's value.

Go to the Apache Tomcat home page using the following URL link:

http://tomcat.apache.org/

Click on the Tomcat 7.0 download link, and it will take you to the download page.

Click on the 32-bit/64-bit Windows Service Installer 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 installer .exe link to download the file that corresponds to your windows operating system architecture type (32 bit or 62 bit); this will start the download of the installer. The STS stable release version at the time of writing this book is STS 3.4.0.RELEASE based on Eclipse 4.3.1.

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; if you want to customize the installation directory, you can specify that in the steps you perform in the wizard.

In step 5 of the wizard, you have to provide the JDK path; just enter the JDK path that you configured for the JAVA_HOME environment variable, as shown in the following screenshot:

Setting the JDK path during the STS installation

Open STS from the start menu option or the desktop icon.

STS will ask you to provide a workspace directory location; provide a workspace directory path as you wish and click on the OK button.

Now, STS will show you a welcome screen. Close the welcome screen and go to the menu bar and navigate to Window | preferences | Server | Runtime Environments.

You can see the available servers listed on the right-hand side; you may also see VMware vFabric tc Server listed under the available servers, which comes along with the STS installation.

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 v7.0 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 click on the OK button. You can find Tomcat's installed directory under C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0 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

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 Maven's installed directory, as shown in the following screenshot:

Selecting Maven's location during the Maven configuration on STS

Now click on the OK button in the Preferences window and close it.

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, Artifact Id as webstore. Then, select Packaging as war and click on the Finish button, as shown in the following screenshot:

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. If you do not see these tabs, then right-click on pom.xml and select the Open With option from the context menu and choose Maven POM editor. Select the Dependencies tab and click on the Add button in the Dependencies section. Don't get confused with the Add button of the Dependencies Management section. You should choose the Add button in the left-hand side pane.

A Select Dependency window will appear; enter Group Id as org.springframework, Artifact Id as spring-webmvc, and Version as 4.0.3.RELEASE. Select Scope as compile and then click on the OK button, as shown in the following screenshot:

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.

Open pom.xml. You will see some tabs at the bottom of pom.xml; select the Overview tab from the bottom of pom.xml, expand the properties accordion, and click on the Create button.

Now, an Add property window will appear; enter Name as maven.compiler.source and Value as 1.7.

Adding the Java compiler version properties to POM

Similarly, create one more property with Name as maven.compiler.target and Value as 1.7.

Finally, save pom.xml.

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

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core"%>

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.0/css/bootstrap.min.css">
<title>Welcome</title>
</head>
<body>
  <section>
    <div class="jumbotron">
      <div class="container">
        <h1> ${greeting} </h1>
        <p> ${tagline} </p>
      </div>
    </div>
  </section>
</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 webstore");
    
    return "welcome";
  }
}

Create web.xml under the src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/ directory in your project and enter the following content inside web.xml and save it:

<web-app version="3.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee 
                  http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd">
  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>DefaultServlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class> org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet </servlet-class>
  </servlet>
  
  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>DefaultServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

</web-app>

Now create one more xml file called DefaultServlet-servlet.xml under the same src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/ directory and enter the following content into it and save it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
  xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-4.0.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-4.0.xsd">


  <mvc:annotation-driven />
  <context:component-scan base-package="com.packt.webstore" />
  
  <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
    <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/" />
    <property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
  </bean>

</beans>

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 v7.0.

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.