The setup of a Spring project

One thing that I seem to forget from project to project (after all, you only need to take care of this once pr project) is that a deployed Spring project is two parts: model, business and controllers is one part, views are another.

This means that in your web.xml you’re likely to have two parts defined, the org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener servlet which contains model, business and controllers, and the org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet that contains your view resolvers and views.

This distinction is important, if nothing else than because it’s easy to set the url-pattern for the view servlet too broad, for instance to /*, and this will surely mingle your requests so that you don’t really know if it goes to the controller or to the view resolver.