Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:
Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.
Creating a Web Application with Spring
Last updated: June 9, 2023
Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.
Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.
To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.
You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.
Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.
Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.
To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.
And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.
Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:
Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.
Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:
Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:
Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.
But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.
To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:
Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:
Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.
I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.
You can explore the course here:
All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.
>> GET THE COURSE
Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.
Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:
End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.
Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.
When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:
Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:
Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:
1. Overview
The tutorial illustrates how to create a Web Application with Spring.
We’ll look into the Spring Boot solution for building the application and also see a non-Spring Boot approach.
We’ll primarily use Java configuration, but also have a look at their equivalent XML configuration.
Further reading:
Spring Boot Tutorial - Bootstrap a Simple Application
This is how you start understanding Spring Boot.
Configure a Spring Boot Web Application
Some of the more useful configs for a Spring Boot application.
Migrating from Spring to Spring Boot
See how to properly migrate from a Spring to Spring Boot.
2. Setting Up Using Spring Boot
2.1. Maven Dependency
First, we’ll need the spring-boot-starter-web dependency:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>This starter includes:
- spring-web and the spring-webmvc module that we need for our Spring web application
- a Tomcat starter so that we can run our web application directly without explicitly installing any server
2.2. Creating a Spring Boot Application
The most straightforward way to get started using Spring Boot is to create a main class and annotate it with @SpringBootApplication:
@SpringBootApplication
public class SpringBootRestApplication {
public static void main(String[] args) {
SpringApplication.run(SpringBootRestApplication.class, args);
}
}This single annotation is equivalent to using @Configuration, @EnableAutoConfiguration, and @ComponentScan.
By default, it will scan all the components in the same package or below.
Next, for Java-based configuration of Spring beans, we need to create a config class and annotate it with @Configuration annotation:
@Configuration
public class WebConfig {
}This annotation is the main artifact used by the Java-based Spring configuration; it is itself meta-annotated with @Component, which makes the annotated classes standard beans and as such, also candidates for component-scanning.
The main purpose of @Configuration classes is to be sources of bean definitions for the Spring IoC Container. For a more detailed description, see the official docs.
Let’s also have a look at a solution using the core spring-webmvc library.
3. Setting Up Using spring-webmvc
3.1. Maven Dependencies
First, we need the spring-webmvc dependency:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>
<version>5.3.3</version>
</dependency>3.2. The Java-based Web Configuration
Next, we’ll add the configuration class that has the @Configuration annotation:
@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
@ComponentScan(basePackages = "com.baeldung.controller")
public class WebConfig {
}Here, unlike the Spring Boot solution, we’ll have to explicitly define @EnableWebMvc for setting up default Spring MVC Configurations and @ComponentScan to specify packages to scan for components.
The @EnableWebMvc annotation provides the Spring Web MVC configuration such as setting up the dispatcher servlet, enabling the @Controller and the @RequestMapping annotations and setting up other defaults.
@ComponentScan configures the component scanning directive, specifying the packages to scan.
3.3. The Initializer Class
Next, we need to add a class that implements the WebApplicationInitializer interface:
public class AppInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {
@Override
public void onStartup(ServletContext container) throws ServletException {
AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext context = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();
context.scan("com.baeldung");
container.addListener(new ContextLoaderListener(context));
ServletRegistration.Dynamic dispatcher =
container.addServlet("mvc", new DispatcherServlet(context));
dispatcher.setLoadOnStartup(1);
dispatcher.addMapping("/");
}
}Here, we’re creating a Spring context using the AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext class, which means we’re using only annotation-based configuration. Then, we’re specifying the packages to scan for components and configuration classes.
Finally, we’re defining the entry point for the web application – the DispatcherServlet.
This class can entirely replace the web.xml file from <3.0 Servlet versions.
4. XML Configuration
Let’s also have a quick look at the equivalent XML web configuration:
<context:component-scan base-package="com.baeldung.controller" />
<mvc:annotation-driven />We can replace this XML file with the WebConfig class above.
To start the application, we can use an Initializer class that loads the XML configuration or a web.xml file. For more details on these two approaches, check out our previous article.
5. Conclusion
In this article, we looked into two popular solutions for bootstrapping a Spring web application, one using the Spring Boot web starter and other using the core spring-webmvc library.
In the next article on REST with Spring, I cover setting up MVC in the project, configuration of the HTTP status codes, payload marshalling, and content negotiation.
The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
