Eclipse/JPA Spring MVC Web Tutorial

This is the Eclipse version of the Spring MVC and JPA tutorial. It demonstrates how to create and run a full Java Spring MVC (Model View Controller) web application in Eclipse - using ObjectDB, JPA, Tomcat (or GlassFish) and Maven.

The demo web application manages a basic guestbook page. Every visitor can sign the guestbook by filling a simple form. The visitors that have already signed are listed below the form:

Persistence is managed by JPA. Every visitor that has signed the guestbook is represented by a Guest JPA entity object and all the Guest entity objects are stored in an ObjectDB database.

Required Software

For this tutorial you will need the following software:

• Java JDK 6.0 (or above).
• Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers.
• m2eclipse (Maven plugin) including Maven Integration for WTP (in m2eclipse extras).

The tutorial was written for Eclipse 3.6.1 but it should work with other Eclipse versions as well (dialog boxes and menus might look slightly different but the code would be the same).

The tutorial is based on using a Maven project. Therefore, required JAR files (ObjectDB, Spring Framework) will be downloaded automatically during build from Maven repositories.

The Tutorial Steps

This tutorial consists of the following steps:

• Step 1: Create a Maven Web Project
• Step 2: Entity Class and Persistence Unit
• Step 3: Define a Spring DAO Component
• Step 4: Add a Controller Class
• Step 5: Add a JSP Page
• Step 6: Set the Spring XML
• Step 7: Run the Spring Web App