Maven: Add Spring dependencies and Spring MVC your project

To enable Spring and Spring MVC modules in your maven project, follow the steps below

1: Add Spring related dependencies. The dependencies below will get all the rest of the transitive dependencies.

<dependency>
    groupid>org.springframework</groupid>
	<artifactid>spring-context</artifactid>
	<version>${org.springframework.version}</version>

	<exclusions>
	      <!-- Exclude Commons Logging in favor of SLF4j -->
    	<exclusion>
	    	<groupid>commons-logging</groupid>
	    	<artifactid>commons-logging</artifactid>
		</exclusion>
   	</exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
	<groupid>org.springframework</groupid>
	<artifactid>spring-webmvc</artifactid>
	<version>${org.springframework.version}</version>
</dependency>

The org.springframework.version property is set to 3.0.3.RELEASE:

<org.springframework.version>3.0.3.RELEASE</org.springframework.version>

2. Setup Dispatcher Servlet in your web.xml:

The Spring MVC requires setting the dispatcher servlet in web.xml. Below we are loading the /WEB-INF/sprin/app-config.xml (the main Spring application configuration file for the project) while instantiating the Dispatcher Servlet at application start up time i.e. when the server is starting up.

NOTE: You can name your application config with any name of your liking. Just make sure it is correctly referenced in Dispatcher Servlet setting in web.xml.

<servlet>
	<servlet-name>springmvcdemo</servlet-name>
	<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
    	<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>/WEB-INF/spring/app-config.xml</param-value>
	</init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
	<servlet-name>springmvcdemo</servlet-name>
   	<url-pattern>/app/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

3. The context config location points to the spring application config file for the application (app-config.xml).

There are 2 things of note here:

a. The com.mayabansi.webappdemo will be scanned for classes annotated with @Controller, @Resources, @Component, @Service etc.
b. The mvc-config.xml, that holds the MVC configuration settings is imported.

<!-- Scans the classpath of this application for @Components to deploy as beans -->
<context:component-scan base-package="com.mayabansi.webappdemo">
  	<!-- Import MVC related configuration -->
   	<import resource="mvc-config.xml"/>        
</context:component-scan>

4. The MVC config file has Spring MVC related configuration settings:

<!-- Configures the @Controller programming model -->
<mvc:annotation-driven>
	<!-- Forwards requests to the "/" resource to the "welcome" view -->
	<mvc:view-controller path="/" view-name="welcome">
	    <!-- Resolves view names to protected .jsp resources within the /WEB-INF/views directory -->
		<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
        	<property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/views/">
            <property name="suffix" value=".jsp">
                  </property>
            </property>
		</bean>
	</mvc:view-controller>
</mvc:annotation-driven>