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This guide walks you through the process of creating a “Hello, World” web site with Spring.

What You Will Build

You will build an application that has a static home page and that will also accept HTTP GET requests at: http://localhost:8080/greeting.

It will respond with a web page that displays HTML. The body of the HTML will contain a greeting: “Hello, World!”

You can customize the greeting with an optional name parameter in the query string. The URL might then be http://localhost:8080/greeting?name=User.

The name parameter value overrides the default value of World and is reflected in the response by the content changing to “Hello, User!”

Starting with Spring Initializr

You can use this pre-initialized project and click Generate to download a ZIP file. This project is configured to fit the examples in this tutorial.

To manually initialize the project:

  1. Navigate to https://start.spring.io. This service pulls in all the dependencies you need for an application and does most of the setup for you.

  2. Choose either Gradle or Maven and the language you want to use. This guide assumes that you chose Java.

  3. Click Dependencies and select Spring Web, Thymeleaf, and Spring Boot DevTools.

  4. Click Generate.

  5. Download the resulting ZIP file, which is an archive of a web application that is configured with your choices.

Note
 If your IDE has the Spring Initializr integration, you can complete this process from your IDE.
Note
 You can also fork the project from Github and open it in your IDE or other editor.

Create a Web Controller

In Spring’s approach to building web sites, HTTP requests are handled by a controller. You can easily identify the controller by the @Controller annotation. In the following example, GreetingController handles GET requests for /greeting by returning the name of a View (in this case, greeting). A View is responsible for rendering the HTML content. The following listing (from src/main/java/com/example/servingwebcontent/GreetingController.java) shows the controller:

link:complete/src/main/java/com/example/servingwebcontent/GreetingController.java[role=include]

This controller is concise and simple, but there is plenty going on. We break it down step by step.

The @GetMapping annotation ensures that HTTP GET requests to /greeting are mapped to the greeting() method.

@RequestParam binds the value of the query string parameter name into the name parameter of the greeting() method. This query string parameter is not required. If it is absent in the request, the defaultValue of World is used. The value of the name parameter is added to a Model object, ultimately making it accessible to the view template.

The implementation of the method body relies on a view technology (in this case, Thymeleaf) to perform server-side rendering of the HTML. Thymeleaf parses the greeting.html template and evaluates the th:text expression to render the value of the ${name} parameter that was set in the controller.The following listing (from src/main/resources/templates/greeting.html) shows the greeting.html template:

link:complete/src/main/resources/templates/greeting.html[role=include]
Tip
 Make sure you have Thymeleaf on your classpath (artifact co-ordinates: org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf). It is already there in the "initial" and "complete" samples in Github.

Spring Boot Devtools

A common feature of developing web applications is coding a change, restarting your application, and refreshing the browser to view the change. This entire process can eat up a lot of time. To speed up this refresh cycle, Spring Boot offers with a handy module known as spring-boot-devtools. Spring Boot Devtools:

  • Enables hot swapping.

  • Switches template engines to disable caching.

  • Enables LiveReload to automatically refresh the browser.

  • Other reasonable defaults based on development instead of production.

Run the Application

The Spring Initializr creates an application class for you. In this case, you need not further modify the class provided by the Spring Initializr. The following listing (from src/main/java/com/example/servingwebcontent/ServingWebContentApplication.java) shows the application class:

link:complete/src/main/java/com/example/servingwebcontent/ServingWebContentApplication.java[role=include]

Logging output is displayed. The application should be up and running within a few seconds.

Test the Application

Now that the web site is running, visit http://localhost:8080/greeting, where you should see “Hello, World!”

Provide a name query string parameter by visiting http://localhost:8080/greeting?name=User. Notice how the message changes from “Hello, World!” to “Hello, User!”:

This change demonstrates that the @RequestParam arrangement in GreetingController is working as expected. The name parameter has been given a default value of World, but it can be explicitly overridden through the query string.

Add a Home Page

Static resources, including HTML and JavaScript and CSS, can be served from your Spring Boot application by dropping them into the right place in the source code. By default, Spring Boot serves static content from resources in the classpath at /static (or /public). The index.html resource is special because, if it exists, it is used as a "welcome page", which means it is served up as the root resource (that is, at http://localhost:8080/). As a result, you need to create the following file (which you can find in src/main/resources/static/index.html):

link:complete/src/main/resources/static/index.html[role=include]

When you restart the application, you will see the HTML at http://localhost:8080/.

Summary

Congratulations! You have just developed a web page by using Spring.