Spring MVC Tutorial for Beginners

Looking for a complete Spring MVC tutorial for beginners?

But at the same time, you don't want to be spoon fed with something at the level of a Spring Boot Hello World app? If so, this Spring Web MVC tutorial is for you.

In this tutorial we start a Spring Boot and Spring MVC project from scratch.

We then incrementally add Controller, RequestBody, GetMapping ResponseBody, Id and Repository Spring annotations (among others) to create a comprehensive Spring CRUD Web MVC project that actually implements a simple little rock-paper-scissors game.

If you want to learn Spring MVC quickly, and really understand how Spring MVC and Spring Boot work together, this fun Spring MVC course is for you!

For a full Spring MVC tutorial, check out the long-form article I wrote over at TheServerSide:

Now, I'm going to paste some AI generated stuff below to capture keywords. Don't read it. Read the article I wrote instead.

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Spring MVC (Model-View-Controller) is a powerful framework within the Spring ecosystem, primarily used for building web applications. Its usefulness stems from several key features:

Separation of Concerns: Spring MVC adheres to the MVC design pattern, which separates the application logic into three interconnected components:

Model: Represents the data and business logic.
View: Handles the presentation layer and user interface.
Controller: Manages user input, processes it, and updates the model and view accordingly.
Comprehensive Configuration Options: Spring MVC can be configured using XML, Java annotations, or Java-based configuration classes, offering flexibility and ease of setup.

Integration with Other Spring Projects: Spring MVC integrates seamlessly with other Spring projects like Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Data, and Spring Cloud, making it a versatile choice for building robust and scalable web applications.

RESTful Web Services: Spring MVC simplifies the creation of RESTful web services, allowing easy mapping of HTTP requests to controller methods.

Key Annotations in Spring MVC
@Controller: Marks a class as a Spring MVC controller, capable of handling web requests.

@RequestMapping: Maps HTTP requests to handler methods of MVC and REST controllers. It can be applied at the class level and/or method level.

@RequestMapping("/path") at the class level specifies the base path for all methods within the class.
@RequestMapping("/methodPath") at the method level specifies the path for a specific method.
@GetMapping, @PostMapping, @PutMapping, @DeleteMapping, @PatchMapping: Specialized versions of @RequestMapping for common HTTP methods:

@GetMapping: Handles HTTP GET requests.
@PostMapping: Handles HTTP POST requests.
@PutMapping: Handles HTTP PUT requests.
@DeleteMapping: Handles HTTP DELETE requests.
@PatchMapping: Handles HTTP PATCH requests.
@RequestParam: Binds a method parameter to a web request parameter.

@RequestParam("name") String name binds the request parameter "name" to the method parameter name.
@PathVariable: Binds a method parameter to a URI template variable.

@PathVariable("id") Long id binds the URI template variable id to the method parameter id.
@RequestBody: Binds the body of the web request to a method parameter, typically used for handling JSON data in RESTful services.

@ResponseBody: Indicates that the return value of a method should be used as the response body, often used in RESTful services to directly return JSON or XML responses.

@ModelAttribute: Binds a method parameter or return value to a model attribute, used for form binding.

@SessionAttributes: Specifies the names of model attributes that should be stored in the session.

@ExceptionHandler: Defines a method to handle exceptions thrown by request-handling methods within the controller.

Spring MVC in the Context of Spring Boot
Spring Boot simplifies the development of Spring applications by providing a range of features, including:

Auto-configuration: Automatically configures your Spring application based on the dependencies present in the classpath. This eliminates much of the boilerplate configuration.

Embedded Servers: Comes with embedded servers like Tomcat, Jetty, or Undertow, making it easy to run Spring applications without external server setup.

Starter Dependencies: Provides a set of convenient dependency descriptors that you can include in your application. For instance, spring-boot-starter-web includes Spring MVC, embedded Tomcat, and other necessary libraries.

Spring Boot Actuator: Provides production-ready features like metrics, health checks, and monitoring.

Spring Boot DevTools: Enhances the development experience by providing features like automatic restarts, live reload, and configurations for better development workflow.

In summary, Spring MVC is an essential part of the Spring ecosystem

[kingdomVI]

These 1hour beginner crash courses are pretty nice. Honestly, you are very good at teaching. You explain everything without over-explaining. This makes it easier to get an idea of what the code you're typing does while keeping the whole video entertaining. I'd like to add that I think unique junior projects like these, or ones just a little bit more complex that apply to real-world scenarios, could be great.

[anikatede]

Awesome intro tutorial! I appreciate how you even explained the difference between a @Controller and @RestController.

Would love to see a Spring Security tutorial, maybe with login and signUp flows!

[H_G]

This has honeslty become the channel for me to come to for Spring - Keep it up mate

[nqoyydh]

Waoo.. your videos makes lot of sense.. Thank you so much. you are helping me understand the Spring framework in easy way.

[sadiulhakim]

I use thymeleaf for my personal projects

[ahmadkhankan]

We need a real world project please 👏🏻