Welcome
 |  |
Step-by-Step Introduction to the [Spring MVC] Web Framework
created by Anthropic’s AI Claude at the request of Serge Tahé - September 2026
This document is a translation of the original French version, generated using an automated tool. Some expressions or technical terms may not fully reflect the original meaning.
This course shows, step by step, how to build a web application with Spring MVC (Spring Boot 4) and Java 21. The HTML pages are generated by the server with Thymeleaf views, with no JavaScript framework in the browser.
It has two parts. First come 28 small examples, each focused on a single concept: controllers, actions and routing, services and dependency injection; binding, converting and validating request parameters; Thymeleaf views, layout and fragments, forms and the Post / Redirect / Get pattern; internationalization with MessageSource and LocaleResolver; bean scopes (singleton, request, prototype) and cookies; the request life cycle with servlet filters, interceptors and @ControllerAdvice; Spring Security, JWT in a cookie, roles, captcha and rate limiting; and finally a layered web / business / DAO architecture with Spring Data JPA, Hibernate and MySQL.
Then comes a complete case study, RdvMedecins: an appointment-booking application for a medical practice, with three roles (administrator, doctors, patients), available in French and English, in which every file is commented.
Prerequisites: the basics of web programming (HTTP, HTML) and of the Java language. The tools used are a JDK 21, Visual Studio Code, Maven (Maven Wrapper), MySQL and curl; installing them is covered in the appendices.
This course belongs to a series that covers the same 28 examples, number by number, with other frameworks: NestJS, ASP.NET Core MVC, Flask, Laravel, Symfony and Django. The frameworks can thus be compared example by example, but this course can be read on its own.