Spring: Developing Java Applications for the Enterprise

Serving static resources

So far, we have seen that every request goes through the Controller and returns a corresponding View file for the request, and most of the time these View files contain dynamic content. By dynamic content, I mean that, during the request processing, the model values are dynamically populated in the View file. For example, if the View file is of the type JSP, then we populate the model values in the JSP file using the JSTL notation ${}.

But what if we have some static content that we want to serve to the client? For example, consider an image that is static content; we don't want to go through Controllers in order to serve (fetch) an image, as there is nothing to process or update in terms of values in the model—we simply ...