Spring: Developing Java Applications for the Enterprise

Understanding the Dispatcher servlet configuration

Now we've got a basic idea of how request mapping works. I also mentioned that every web request first comes to the Dispatcher servlet, but the question is how does the Dispatcher servlet know it should handle every incoming request? The answer is we explicitly instructed it to do so through the getServletMappings method of the DispatcherServletInitializer class. Yes, when we return the string array containing only the "/" character, it indicates the DispatcherServlet configuration as the default servlet of the application. So every incoming request will be handled by DispatcherServlet.

Time for action - examining the servlet mapping

Let's observe what will happen when we change the return value ...