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Chapter 5

Building Java Web Applications

with Spring Web MVC

Anything you can do, I can do Meta.

—Daniel Dennett

Mark Twain once said, “In the spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather.” Almost
certainly, he wasn’t referring to the Spring Framework. Or was he clairvoyant? The Spring
Framework has grown to become an ecosystem of projects; it includes many distinct modules,
integrates numerous frameworks and libraries, and provides a varied range of capabilities in diverse
areas such as Flash, enterprise applications, web services, data stores, OSGi,^1 and even .NET.
Spring applications are supported on all popular cloud platforms such as Cloud Foundry,^2 Google
App Engine, and Amazon EC2^3 and can leverage traditional RDBMSs as well as new NoSQL^4
solutions and data stores like PostgreSQL,^5 MySQL, MongoDB,^6 and Redis.^7 Unlike many other
frameworks such as Struts, which is confined to developing web applications, the Spring Framework
can be used to build stand-alone, web, and JEE applications. Spring provides support for building
modern web applications including REST, HTML5, and Ajax, as well as mobile client platforms
including Android and iPhone. The Spring Framework has remarkably changed the enterprise Java
landscape forever by connecting components with systems so that you do not have to write the
plumbing code, thus allowing you to focus on the business of the application.

(^1) http://www.osgi.org/Main/HomePage
(^2) http://www.cloudfoundry.com/
(^3) http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
(^4) http://nosql-database.org/
(^5) http://www.postgresql.org/
(^6) http://www.mongodb.org/
(^7) http://redis.io/