@MVC: New Programming Model of Spring Web MVC

In an excellent article, Rossen Stoyanchev of SpringSource presents a bunch of new annotation-based features of Spring Web MVC framework.

Quote:

@MVC changes [Spring Web MVC] programming model in 3 significant ways.

1. It does not have any interface or base class requirements.
2. It allows any number of request handling methods.
3. It allows a high degree of flexibility in the method's signature.

Given those three it's fair to say @MVC is not merely an alternative. It's the next step in the evolution of Spring MVC's controller technology.

The new programming model is an example of a POJO-centric approach that, combined with sensible convention-based defaults, greatly simplifies and facilitates web development based on Spring Web MVC framework.

This is a very welcome change as Spring Web used to be notorious for its verbose and extremely fine-grained configuration. With Spring 2.5 @MVC one can express oneself as consise as follows:

@Controller
public class AccountsController {

 private AccountRepository accountRepository;

 @Autowired
public AccountsController(AccountRepository accountRepository) {
   this.accountRepository = accountRepository;
}

 @RequestMapping(method=RequestMethod.GET)
public void show(@RequestParam("number") String number, Map model)
{
   model.put("account", accountRepository.findAccount(number));
}
...

The above code says:

1. Map /accounts/show URL to AccountsController.show() method (AccountsController <-> /acccounts and show() <-> /show by convention).
2. Parse out number request parameter and pass it as a String argument to show() method.
3. Build the model and pass it to /WEB-INF/views/accounts/show.jsp. Here the end parts come from the config file and the middle part is a convention-based function of controller class/method names.

Neat. The gap between Grails and "raw" Spring Web MVC just got narrower.

An Excellent Spring Web MVC Example

In a quest for a Spring Web MVC tutorial I found this gem - succinct, good style, and to the point. Somehow it's the last entry on the first page of Google search results. Voting with this post in hope to improve the rating of the article.