Building a Layered Application with Spring

Now you are familiar with the roles of various Spring modules and have some idea of their responsibilities. I'll now show how to put these modules together to build a layered web application with the Spring Framework. Figure 2-2 shows the high-level architecture of this application.

Figure 2-2 Lightweight application architecture with the Spring Framework

Figure 2-2 shows a three-tier web application leveraging the different Spring Framework modules. I will dissect each of the tiers to see how these modules are utilized and what different options are available to build a flexible, simple enterprise Spring application.

Presentation Tier

As the name suggests, Spring MVC provides first-class components to build web applications following the MVC pattern. Like any good web framework, Spring MVC helps build the controller layer. It is flexible and supports a variety of components for view management, including core Java EE technologies such as JSP and others such as Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and Portable Document Format (PDF).