Setting Up a Spring Web Application

Create a Spring Boot project from Spring Initializr. Spring Boot favors convention over configuration and provides default configurations for setting up a servlet container and configuring DispatcherServlet, which is the central servlet in Spring MVC applications.

Choose "Maven" as "Project", "Java" as "Language" and the latest stable version of Spring Boot. For the "Project Metadata" we have used the following:

• Group: io.datajek.springmvc

• Artifact: tennis-player-web

We will add the Spring Web dependency and the Spring Boot Dev Tools dependency. Click "Generate" to download the project.

Once the project has been imported in the IDE, we can see a hierarchy of folders as follows:

• src/main/java: This is where the source code is placed.

• src/main/resources: This folder is used for resources like property or configuration files.

• src/test/java: All test code is placed in this folder.

• src/main/webapp: We will create a webapp folder for the JSP files, web configuration files and assets like CSS or images etc.

Required dependencies

The spring-boot-starter-web dependency simplifies web development using Spring MVC and an embedded Tomcat server. It includes all the necessary common dependencies, such as the Spring framework, logging, validation, JSON support, and more, with compatible versions pre-configured. This eliminates the need to manage a multitude of dependencies and ensures smoother development compared to traditional Spring MVC applications.

Jasper dependency

To enable JSP compilation and rendering in our application, we must include Jasper which is the JSP Engine for Tomcat. It is responsible for compiling JSP files into Java servlets, which are then executed to generate dynamic web content. It parses JSP files, translates them into Java code, compiles the Java code into servlets, and finally, executes the servlets to produce HTML content dynamically. This makes Jasper a critical component for enabling the use of JSP technology in web applications deployed on Tomcat servers. We will add the tomcat-embed-jasper dependency, which brings JSP support in Spring Boot as follows.