Lesson 17 / 38

JSP & the MVC Pattern

Separate request handling from view rendering with the Model 2 / MVC pattern, where a front controller builds a model and forwards to a JSP or template view.

Model 2 / MVC

A front controller (servlet) handles the request, builds a model, and forwards to a view (JSP or a template engine like Thymeleaf) for HTML. Business logic never lives in the page. Modern stacks replace raw JSP with Spring MVC controllers returning views or JSON.

DispatcherServlet: Spring's front controller

Spring MVC's DispatcherServlet is the Model 2 front controller: it receives every request, resolves the matching @Controller method, and either renders a view name or, with @RestController, writes the return value straight to the response body as JSON.