Spring in Action, Fifth Edition

Chapter 2. Developing web applications

This chapter covers

• Presenting model data in the browser
• Processing and validating form input
• Choosing a view template library

First impressions are important. Curb appeal can sell a house long before the home buyer enters the door. A car’s cherry paint job will turn more heads than what’s under the hood. And literature is replete with stories of love at first sight. What’s inside is very important, but what’s outside—what’s seen first—is important.

The applications you’ll build with Spring will do all kinds of things, including crunching data, reading information from a database, and interacting with other applications. But the first impression your application users will get comes from the user interface. ...