Random Thoughts

In this blog post, I will share a Spring 4 based starter project that can be used to jump start Spring based web development. The complete project is available on GitHub at: spring4-web

This starter project has the following features:

• Completely updated to use Spring 4.0 and Servlet 3.0. You will need containers such as Tomcat 7 to use this project.
• Fully working pom.xml file with all the required dependencies
• Working configuration with a sample controller
• A “catch all” global exception handler using @ControllerAdvice
• Support for message resources
• A sample Spring configuration file for middle tier (service/repository layers)
• SLF4J and Logback for logging
• Spring BOM file included in the pom so that correct versions of Spring projects are bundled

If you have generated Spring Web projects using my archetype, you will notice that this starter project is not vastly different. Here are few changes/best practices I am following this time:

1. The config files no longer contain XSD version. So instead of using http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.2.0.xsd in the configuration files, I will be using http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
2. All the JSP pages are now moved to WEB-INF/views folder. Using Spring’s , I have eleminated the need to have a starter .jsp or html page under the project root.
3. All the Spring configuration files are now located under src/main/resources/spring folder.

If you get the project running successfully, you should see a page similar to this:

If there is an error in the application, you will see the exception page with a correlation id. I am using Apache Commons Lang’s RandomStringUtils to generate correlation ids.

I will be using this starter project in my future blogs to demo some of Spring 4’s new features. Give this a try and let me know what you think.