how to leverage on Spring MVC to implement front controller but not using controllers

Question

the title of this post might be confusing.I'll try be best to clarify it. I Started a project using Spring MVC it works fine no problem.After that i've realized that i was a bit overkill and found that i needed a front controller dispatcher because all a wanted was nice urls without extensions.

So instead of implementing a whole new font controller i will like to take advantage of the existing Spring MVC setup. here is an example of a controller

 @RequestMapping("/accounts")
public String home() {

    return "accounts";
}

 @RequestMapping(value="/")
public String Home(){
    return "home";
}

as you can see, the return string is the one indicating the view based on the resourceviewresolver

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
  <property name="prefix" value="/views/" />
  <property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
</bean>

now i don't want to use the controller, but need a mechanism to map the request to a physical page.i'm wondering if that could be possible.

How can i do that? i should simply create another dispatcher?

thanks for reading this and helping out.

Answer 1

Spring 3 supports <mvc:view-controller> element for such cases:

<mvc:view-controller path="/" view-name="home" />
<mvc:view-controller path="/accounts" view-name="accounts" />

See also:

• MVC Simplifications in Spring 3.0