Spring MVC Workshop

For as long as there has been a Spring Framework, there has been Spring MVC, a web framework built around the principals of Spring. Although it was originally designed around a deep hierarchy of controller classes and focused on HTML-oriented views, Spring MVC has evolved in the past few years to embrace an annotation-oriented model and RESTful web development.

In this workshop, we'll use Spring MVC to build the web front-end of an application. We'll start with the essentials and work our way up to try out the latest Spring MVC features in Spring 3.1. We'll explore the following Spring MVC topics:

• Spring MVC essentials (request mapping, controllers, and views)
• Field formatting and validation
• Spring's JSP tag libraries
• Handling file uploads
• Content negotiation and non-HTML views
• Request and response body conversion
• Advanced request mapping
• And much more!

Whether you're a Spring newbie or a long-time Spring veteran, this is your chance to get a hands-on experience with everything Spring MVC can do.

IMPORTANT!!! PRE-WORKSHOP SETUP INSTRUCTIONS!!!

In order to ensure a successful workshop, it is imperative that you arrive with the following installed on your computer:

• Java SDK 1.5 or higher (not the JRE!)
• Maven 3.0.3 (or newer): http://maven.apache.org/
• SpringSource Tool Suite (2.8.0 or higher): http://www.springsource.com/developer/sts

Also, before arriving, it will save time if you have already verified this setup. As part of the verification, perform the following steps:

1. Start SpringSource ToolSuite
2. Create a new Spring MVC template project (File->New->Spring Template Project, then select “Spring MVC Project”). Name the project “SpringMVC”. (Note that if this is the first time you've created a Spring MVC template project, it may take some time to download the templates.)
3. Once the project has been created and has had a chance to build in the IDE, drag the project into the tcServer instance (“VMWare vFabric tc Server Developer Edition v2.6”) in the “Servers” tab.
4. Start tcServer
5. After the server starts fully, point your browser to http://localhost:8080/SpringMVC and verify that you are greeted with a “Hello World!” message along with the current time.

We will not have time during the workshop to setup your environment, so please arrive having performed these setup steps. If you need any help getting started, feel free to email craig-mvcws@habuma.com and I'll do my best to help out.