Spring’s web MVC framework is, like many other web MVC frameworks, request-driven, designed around a central Servlet that dispatches requests to controllers and offers other functionality that facilitates the development of web applications. Spring’s DispatcherServlet however, does more than just that. It is completely integrated with the Spring IoC container and as such allows you to use every other feature that Spring has.

　　The request processing workflow of the Spring Web MVC DispatcherServlet is illustrated in the following diagram. The pattern-savvy reader will recognize that the DispatcherServlet is an expression of the "Front Controller" design pattern (this is a pattern that Spring Web MVC shares with many other leading web frameworks).

The request processing workflow in Spring Web MVC (high level)

The DispatcherServlet is an actual Servlet (it inherits from the HttpServlet base class), and as such is declared in the web.xml of your web application. You need to map requests that you want the DispatcherServlet to handle, by using a URL mapping in the same web.xml file. This is standard Java EE Servlet configuration; the following example shows such a DispatcherServlet declaration and mapping:

<web-app>

    <servlet>

        <servlet-name>example</servlet-name>

        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>

        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>

    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>

        <servlet-name>example</servlet-name>

        <url-pattern>/example/*</url-pattern>

    </servlet-mapping>

</web-app>

In the preceding example, all requests starting with /example will be handled by the DispatcherServlet instance named example. In a Servlet 3.0+ environment, you also have the option of configuring the Servlet container programmatically. Below is the code based equivalent of the above web.xml example:

public class MyWebApplicationInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {

    @Override

    public void onStartup(ServletContext container) {

        ServletRegistration.Dynamic registration = container.addServlet("dispatcher", new DispatcherServlet());

        registration.setLoadOnStartup(1);

        registration.addMapping("/example/*");

    }

}

　　WebApplicationInitializer is an interface provided by Spring MVC that ensures your code-based configuration is detected and automatically used to initialize any Servlet 3 container. An abstract base class implementation of this interface named AbstractDispatcherServletInitializer makes it even easier to register the DispatcherServlet by simply specifying its servlet mapping. See Code-based Servlet container initialization for more details.

　　The above is only the first step in setting up Spring Web MVC. You now need to configure the various beans used by the Spring Web MVC framework (over and above the DispatcherServlet itself).

　　As detailed in Section 5.15, “Additional Capabilities of the ApplicationContext”, ApplicationContext instances in Spring can be scoped. In the Web MVC framework, each DispatcherServlet has its own WebApplicationContext, which inherits all the beans already defined in the root WebApplicationContext. These inherited beans can be overridden in the servlet-specific scope, and you can define new scope-specific beans local to a given Servlet instance.

Upon initialization of a DispatcherServlet, Spring MVC looks for a file named [servlet-name]-servlet.xml in the WEB-INF directory of your web application and creates the beans defined there, overriding the definitions of any beans defined with the same name in the global scope.

Consider the following DispatcherServlet Servlet configuration (in the web.xml file):

<web-app>

    <servlet>

        <servlet-name>golfing</servlet-name>

        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>

        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>

    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>

        <servlet-name>golfing</servlet-name>

        <url-pattern>/golfing/*</url-pattern>

    </servlet-mapping>

</web-app

With the above Servlet configuration in place, you will need to have a file called /WEB-INF/golfing-servlet.xml in your application; this file will contain all of your Spring Web MVC-specific components (beans). You can change the exact location of this configuration file through a Servlet initialization parameter (see below for details).

<web-app>

    <context-param>

        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>

        <param-value>/WEB-INF/root-context.xml</param-value>

    </context-param>

    <servlet>

        <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>

        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>

        <init-param>

            <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>

            <param-value></param-value>

        </init-param>

        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>

    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>

        <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>

        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>

    </servlet-mapping>

    <listener>

        <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>

    </listener>

</web-app>

The WebApplicationContext is an extension of the plain ApplicationContext that has some extra features necessary for web applications. It differs from a normal ApplicationContext in that it is capable of resolving themes (see Section 17.9, “Using themes”), and that it knows which Servlet it is associated with (by having a link to the ServletContext). The WebApplicationContext is bound in the ServletContext, and by using static methods on the RequestContextUtils class you can always look up the WebApplicationContext if you need access to it.