Spring: A Developer's Notebook

Enhancing the Web Application

The code that you've seen so far begins to provide much needed organization with distinct models, views, and controllers. In this section, we'll add validation logic, a resolver, and input forms.

These enhancements will add better organization to your code and save you time and effort. Like many MVC frameworks, these classic enhancements make it easier to handle the classic flow of control that you generally get with web applications:

Resolvers

As your application grows, you'll want to refer to each page with a logical name rather than a full path. The resolver manages the details, like the extension and the path, letting you specify these details in your configuration.

Form

These input JSPs make it easy to manage user input, providing easy place holders for data, and a work flow for forms submission. Forms are separated into the view, and controller. The physical view can utilize a special Spring tag library to bind form fields to POJO properties.

Validators

These beans work with input forms to make it easy to handle business validation. They have no dependencies on Spring's Web MVC—you need only implement an interface—so it's easy to package your validation with your business logic.

These simple enhancements let you manage the flow of control in a manner that's consistent and organized. It also lets you keep code in a consistent place, and keep coupling to a bare minimum.

How do I do that?

We're going to code our enhancements in two distinct steps. First, ...