7.1. Getting started with Spring MVC

Have you ever seen the children’s game Mousetrap? It’s crazy. The goal is to send a small steel ball over a series of wacky contraptions in order to trigger a mousetrap. The ball goes over all kinds of intricate gadgets, from rolling down a curvy ramp to springing off a teeter-totter to spinning on a miniature Ferris wheel to being kicked out of a bucket by a rubber boot. It goes through all of this to spring a trap on a poor, unsuspecting plastic mouse.

At first glance, you may think that Spring’s MVC framework is a lot like Mousetrap. Instead of moving a ball around through various ramps, teeter-totters, and wheels, Spring moves requests around between a dispatcher servlet, handler mappings, controllers, and view resolvers.