Spring Boot: Integrating Static Content

In this post, we go over the basics of creating static content for a web applicaiton by integrating several different web development tools, frameworks, and languages.

Ranga Karanam

CORE ·

Jan. 17, 18 · Tutorial

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This guide will help you create a simple web application with Spring Boot. We will add static content (CSS and JS) and use it from a JSP view.

You Will Learn

How to Bootstrap a simple project with Spring Initializr.
How to initialize a basic web application for Spring Boot.
How to add a JSP for a web application.
How to add static content - JS and CSS.

Tools You Will Need

Maven 3.0+ is your build tool.
Your favorite IDE. We use Eclipse.
JDK 1.8+

Overview of the Web application

We will build a static todo page (unformatted) rendered using a JSP.

Files

The following screenshot shows an Eclipse project with all the files we will create.

Here's a brief overview of all our files:

SpringBootWebApplicationBootstrapJqueryApplication.java - Spring Boot Application class. This initializes the Spring Boot application with auto-configuration.
WelcomeController.java - A Controller with a method to redirect to the view - JSP.
welcome.jsp - The view - using our custom JS and CSS.
application.properties - This is typically used to configure frameworks in Spring Boot. In this example, we would configure our view resolver in application.properties.
custom.css - contains some basic CSS.
custom.js - contains a JavaScript alert.

You can find the complete project on GitHub.

Bootstrapping a Web Application With Spring Initializr

Creating a web application with Spring Initializr is a cake walk.

Spring Initializr is great tool to bootstrap your Spring Boot projects.

As shown in the image above, the following steps have to be performed:

Launch Spring Initializr and choose the following:
- Choose com.in28minutes.springboot.web.application as the Group.
- Choose spring-boot-web-application-bootstrap-jquery as the Artifact.
- Choose the following dependencies:
  - Web
  - Actuator
  - DevTools
Click 'Generate Project.'
Import the project into Eclipse.

Project Dependencies

Spring Boot Starter Web provides all the dependencies and the auto-configuration needed to develop web applications. It is the first dependency we will use.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>

We want to use JSP as the view. The default embedded servlet container for Spring Boot Starter Web is Tomcat. To enable support for JSPs, we would need to add a dependency on tomcat-embed-jasper.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomcat-embed-jasper</artifactId>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

Configuring a View Resolver

We would have our JSPs in /WEB-INF/jsp/. We would need to configure the view resolver with the prefix and suffix.

spring.mvc.view.prefix=/WEB-INF/jsp/
spring.mvc.view.suffix=.jsp

Controller

Let's add in a simple controller redirecting to the view.

/src/main/java/com/in28minutes/springboot/tutorial/basics/application/configuration/WelcomeController.java

@Controller
public class WelcomeController {    
    @RequestMapping("/welcome")
    public String loginMessage(){
        return "welcome";
    }
}

The URL to this controller method will be http://localhost:8080/welcome

Adding a view

Let's create a simple with a basic HTML structure. We will create a basic table which we will want to format a little later.

/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsp/welcome.jsp

<html>
<head>
    <title>Welcome</title>
</head>
<body>
    <div class="container">
        <table class="table table-striped">
            <caption>Your todos are</caption>
            <thead>
                <tr>
                    <th>Description</th>
                    <th>Target Date</th>
                    <th>Is it Done?</th>
                    <th>Edit</th>
                    <th>Delete</th>
                </tr>
            </thead>
            <tbody>
                    <tr>
                        <td>Todo 1</td>
                        <td>10/12/2017</td>
                        <td>No</td>
                        <td><a class="btn btn-warning" href="/edit-todo">Edit Todo</a></td>
                        <td><a class="btn btn-warning" href="/delete-todo">Delete Todo</a></td>
                    </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
        <div>
            <a class="btn btn-default" href="/add-todo">Add a Todo</a>

        </div>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Adding Static Content (CSS and JS)

The recommended folder for static content is /src/main/resources/static.

We will create the CSS as shown below. It will give a light blue background color to the body of the page.

/src/main/resources/static/css/custom.css

body {
    background-color: lightblue;
}

Next, we will create a custom JS file that will throw an alert.

/src/main/resources/static/js/custom.js

alert("I'm active");

Using JS and CSS in View

Referring to the JS file:

<script src="js/custom.js"></script>

Referring to jQuery:

<link href="css/custom.css"
        rel="stylesheet">

The complete, updated view is shown below.

/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsp/welcome.jsp

<html>
<head>
    <title>Welcome</title>
    <link href="css/custom.css"
        rel="stylesheet">
</head>
<body>
    <div class="container">
        <table class="table table-striped">
            <caption>Your todos are</caption>
            <thead>
                <tr>
                    <th>Description</th>
                    <th>Target Date</th>
                    <th>Is it Done?</th>
                    <th>Edit</th>
                    <th>Delete</th>
                </tr>
            </thead>
            <tbody>
                    <tr>
                        <td>Todo 1</td>
                        <td>10/12/2017</td>
                        <td>No</td>
                        <td><a class="btn btn-warning" href="/edit-todo">Edit Todo</a></td>
                        <td><a class="btn btn-warning" href="/delete-todo">Delete Todo</a></td>
                    </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
        <div>
            <a class="btn btn-default" href="/add-todo">Add a Todo</a>

        </div>
        <script src="js/custom.js"></script>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Complete Code Example

/pom.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>com.in28minutes.springboot.web.application</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-web-application-bootstrap-jquery</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>jar</packaging>

    <name>spring-boot-web-application-bootstrap-jquery</name>
    <description>Spring Boot Tutorial - Adding Bootstrap and jQuery to Web Application</description>

    <parent>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
        <version>2.0.0.M6</version>
        <relativePath /> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
    </parent>

    <properties>
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
        <project.reporting.outputEncoding>UTF-8</project.reporting.outputEncoding>
        <java.version>1.8</java.version>
    </properties>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
            <artifactId>tomcat-embed-jasper</artifactId>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>spring-snapshots</id>
            <name>Spring Snapshots</name>
            <url>https://repo.spring.io/snapshot</url>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </repository>
        <repository>
            <id>spring-milestones</id>
            <name>Spring Milestones</name>
            <url>https://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </repository>
    </repositories>

    <pluginRepositories>
        <pluginRepository>
            <id>spring-snapshots</id>
            <name>Spring Snapshots</name>
            <url>https://repo.spring.io/snapshot</url>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>true</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </pluginRepository>
        <pluginRepository>
            <id>spring-milestones</id>
            <name>Spring Milestones</name>
            <url>https://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </pluginRepository>
    </pluginRepositories>


</project>

/src/main/java/com/in28minutes/springboot/tutorial/basics/application/configuration/SpringBootWebApplicationBootstrapJqueryApplication.java

package com.in28minutes.springboot.tutorial.basics.application.configuration;

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;

@SpringBootApplication
public class SpringBootWebApplicationBootstrapJqueryApplication {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(SpringBootWebApplicationBootstrapJqueryApplication.class, args);
    }
}

/src/main/java/com/in28minutes/springboot/tutorial/basics/application/configuration/WelcomeController.java

package com.in28minutes.springboot.tutorial.basics.application.configuration;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;

@Controller
public class WelcomeController {    
    @RequestMapping("/welcome")
    public String loginMessage(){
        return "welcome";
    }
}

/src/main/resources/application.properties

spring.mvc.view.prefix=/WEB-INF/jsp/
spring.mvc.view.suffix=.jsp
logging.level.org.springframework.web=INFO

/src/main/resources/static/css/custom.css

body {
    background-color: lightblue;
}

/src/main/resources/static/js/custom.js

alert("I'm active");

/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsp/welcome.jsp

<html>
<head>
    <title>Welcome</title>
    <link href="css/custom.css"
        rel="stylesheet">
</head>
<body>
    <div class="container">
        <table class="table table-striped">
            <caption>Your todos are</caption>
            <thead>
                <tr>
                    <th>Description</th>
                    <th>Target Date</th>
                    <th>Is it Done?</th>
                    <th>Edit</th>
                    <th>Delete</th>
                </tr>
            </thead>
            <tbody>
                    <tr>
                        <td>Todo 1</td>
                        <td>10/12/2017</td>
                        <td>No</td>
                        <td><a class="btn btn-warning" href="/edit-todo">Edit Todo</a></td>
                        <td><a class="btn btn-warning" href="/delete-todo">Delete Todo</a></td>
                    </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
        <div>
            <a class="btn btn-default" href="/add-todo">Add a Todo</a>
            
        </div>
        <script src="js/custom.js"></script>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

/src/test/java/com/in28minutes/springboot/tutorial/basics/application/configuration/SpringBootWebApplicationBootstrapJqueryApplicationTests.java

package com.in28minutes.springboot.tutorial.basics.application.configuration;

import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.springframework.boot.test.context.SpringBootTest;
import org.springframework.test.context.junit4.SpringRunner;

@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@SpringBootTest
public class SpringBootWebApplicationBootstrapJqueryApplicationTests {

    @Test
    public void contextLoads() {
    }

}

Spring Framework Spring Boot Web application

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