View resolvers

We saw the purpose of the first two tags that are specified within the web application context configuration file:

<mvc:annotation-driven />
<context:component-scan base-package="com.packt.webstore" />

Based on these tags, Spring creates the necessary beans to handle a web request and also creates beans for all the @Controller classes. However, to run a Spring MVC application successfully, Spring needs one more bean; this bean is called a view resolver.

A view resolver helps the dispatcher servlet identify the views that have to be rendered as the response for a specific web request. Spring MVC provides various view resolver implementations to identify views, and InternalResourceViewResolver is one such implementation. The final tag in the web application context configuration is the bean definition for the InternalResourceViewResolver class as follows:

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
<property name="prefix...