I just finished writing the first chapter of Mastering Spring MVC 4. That was a lot of fun. I enjoyed sharing the tips and tricks that I use when I bootstrap a Spring application.

In this first chapter, you will learn how to get started with spring MVC in a snap.

Know thy tools

Have you heard of Spring Tool Suite? Do you know start.spring.io? Did you know you could actually curl start.spring.io?

You will learn all that and much more in this action-packed first chapter!

The power of Spring Boot

Did you know spring boot actually does a lot of things for us?

  1. Initializing the DispatcherServlet of Spring MVC
  2. Setting up an encoding filter, which will enforce correct encoding of clients’ requests
  3. Setting up a view resolver to tell Spring where to find our views
  4. Configuring static resources locations (css, js)
  5. Configuring supported locales and resource bundles
  6. Configuring a multipart resolver for file uploads to work
  7. Including tomcat or jetty to run our application on a web server
  8. Setting up error pages (404, etc)

The first chapter walks you through Spring Boot’s code to explain how it works and how to customize the default configurations.

A big thank you to Phillip Webb, co-lead of Spring Boot for helping me and my editor sort out potential licensing issues when quoting Spring Boot’s code. If you’re interested, the code is under Apache license and allows reproduction under the conditions listed in paragraph 4.

Well guys, good talking to you but I’d better get back to writing chapter two, which is about the MVC architecture and Spring MVC views and navigation.