Introduction to Spring MVC

Spring Web MVC is the original web framework built specifically on top of the native Java Servlet API. The name "MVC" stands for Model-View-Controller, which is the foundational design pattern determining how the application separates logic.

Overview of Web Applications

A traditional Web Application processes network requests and dynamically returns formatted HTML documents to the user's browser.

Historically in Java, creating web pages required writing "Servlets" or "JSP (JavaServer Pages)" documents. This caused Java logic and HTML tags to become heavily tangled in a highly messy fashion, known as "spaghetti code."

Spring MVC cleanly segregates tasks to solve this:

1. Model: Represents the internal application data payload (for example, a User class containing a Name and Email).
2. View: Represents the UI template returning to the browser (such as an HTML document or a Thymeleaf template). The View has zero business logic; it exists merely to display the Model data.
3. Controller: The central Java class handling the incoming HTML network request. It executes the backend business logic perfectly, packages the data into the Model, and routes it to the specific View for rendering.

Separation of Concerns

By enforcing MVC natively, Spring ensures that frontend developers can configure the View templates completely independently while remote backend architecture developers work securely in the Controller classes.

This establishes a clean Separation of Concerns.