Spring in Practice

Chapter 4. Basic web forms

This chapter covers

• Building a web form
• Externalizing strings in a view
• Validating and saving form data

Web forms provide a means by which we can collect data from end users. As such, they’re a key aspect of any nontrivial web application. This chapter shows how to use Spring Web MVC and related technologies to build a simple user registration form with standard features such as redirect-after-post, externalized strings, form data validation, and persistence.

Our approach is hands-on and practical. See Spring in Action, 3rd edition by Craig Walls (Manning, 2011) for additional material on Spring Web MVC.

4.1. Displaying a web form

Prerequisites

None

Key technologies

Spring Web MVC, Spring form tag library ...