Creating Spring context

Now that we have DispatcherServlet defined in web.xml, we can go ahead and create our Spring context. Initially, we will create a very simple context without really defining anything concrete:

    <beans > <!-Schema Definition removed --> 
       <context:component-scan  
       base-package="com.mastering.spring.springmvc"  /> 
       <mvc:annotation-driven /> 
    </beans>

We are defining a component scan for the com.mastering.spring.springmvc package so that all the beans and controllers in this package are created and auto-wired.

Using <mvc:annotation-driven/> initializes support for a number of features that Spring MVC supports such as:

• Request mapping
• Exception handling
• Data binding and validation
• Automatic conversion (for example, JSON) when the @RequestBody annotation is used

That's all the setup we need to be able to set up a Spring MVC application. We are ready to get started with the first flow.