Java web app hello world

Question

I have a couple of questions.

I'm trying to learn how to make web apps with Java (I'm coming from C#). The project which I'm going to work on is using Spring MVC.

Now all the tutorials of Spring MVC / Java want me to use Maven. I'm also using Eclipse.

My problem is that every time I try to run a project downloaded from some tutorial like these: http://tech-read.com/2011/10/31/spring-3-mvc-annotations/ http://www.mkyong.com/spring3/spring-3-mvc-hello-world-example/

I can't run the project. it tells me that the project has no main and then tries to find a class, nothing very clear... I've also watched youtube videos about it, and some guy was using Jetty to launch the website. (video link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv9tXFrTLtI)

So my question is:

If I have Eclipse, Oracle JDK 1.7, Spring Tool Suite 3, Maven + m2e - Maven Integration for Eclipse, Spring IDE blah blah plugin, should I be able to run a website from a simple Hello World project? If so, Is there something specific I have to tell Maven / Eclipse to launch my things?

Answer 1

You could use jetty. Add the jetty plugin in your pom like this :

   <build>
  <finalName>spring-mvc-webapp</finalName>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
      <configuration>
        <source>1.7</source>
        <target>1.7</target>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>6.0.1</version>
      <configuration>
        <scanIntervalSeconds>10</scanIntervalSeconds>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

Execute mvn jetty:run

Connect to URL : http://localhost:8080/spring-mvc-webapp/

Answer 2

You need to run it in a server context.

To do this you need to install a java web server, like svz said. Tomcat is the one I use.

Spring Source Toolkit (STS) comes with this set up out of the box. Spring is confusing enough to learn, I would suggest using this IDE until you get the hang of it, then you can experiment with better (different?) web servers.

Try right clicking on your project and running it on a server. It should be set up to do it for you out of the box.

You can also install it as a plugin to eclipse, or install tomcat manually and drop your war files into the app directory.