Spring MVC application with Cucumber and Selenium part 1

By Barnaby Golden, 18 June, 2013

Part 1 - Build a simple Spring MVC application

This is a multi-part posting on building a reference web application.

The focus here is on tools and process rather than the actual functionality.

Bootstrap a simple Maven project (easiest in Eclipse with the M2Eclipse plugin).

Add the following directories (if not there already):

src/main/java src/main/resources src/test/java src/test/resources

Add the following dependencies to the pom:

spring-core spring-context spring-webmvc

and make sure you have the following directories:

src/main/webapp src/main/webapp/WEB-INF

Add a simple web.xml to the WEB-INF directory, something like:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
     xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
     xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
     id="WebApp_ID" version="2.5">
      <display-name>Spring MVC tutorial</display-name> 
      <servlet>
        <servlet-name>SpringMvcServlet</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
      </servlet>
      <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>SpringMvcServlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>*.go</url-pattern>
      </servlet-mapping>
    </web-app>

Worth running mvn eclipse:eclipse at this stage if you are working in Eclipse. Also add a servlet bean file <servlet_name>-servlet.xml (e.g. SpringMvcServlet-servlet.xml):

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
      xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans       http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
      http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.1.xsd
      http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.1.xsd">
  
      <!-- Enabling Spring beans auto-discovery -->
      <context:component-scan base-package="com.blizzardtec.controller" />
 
      <!-- Enabling Spring MVC configuration through annotations -->
      <mvc:annotation-driven />
 
      <!-- Defining which view resolver to use -->
      <bean class= "org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver" >
        <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/views/" />
        <property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
      </bean>
    </beans>

Add a controller that matches the package you defined in your servlet bean file (it doesn't matter what it is called as we will use annotations:

/**
 * Base Spring MVC controller.
 */
package com.blizzardtec.controller;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod;

/**
 * @author Barnaby Golden
 *
 */
@Controller
public final class MyController {

    /**
     * Request handler.
     *
     * @return str
     */
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/home")
    public String handleRequest() {
     return "welcome";
    }
}

Add a new folder:

src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/views

and put inside it a jsp file matching the return string (i.e. welcome.jsp):

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
    pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Spring MVC Maven Webapp</title>
</head>
<body>
A simple Spring MVC Maven web application.
</body>
</html>

Deploy to Tomcat and it should be accessible on the path:

http://localhost:8080/spring-mvc-webapp-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/home.go

Source code for this Spring MVC Maven application can be found in this Github project.

In the second part of this post we add Cucumber.

Spring MVC application with Cucumber and Selenium part 1

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