Spring and Thymeleaf with JavaConfig (Part 1)

In this tutorial, we will create a CRUD application based on Spring MVC 3.x and Spring Data JPA. We will utilize JavaConfig instead of XML to configure our application. For the view layer, we will use Thymeleaf as our template engine instead of JSP to process our html pages.

Table of Contents

Click on a link to jump to that section:

1. Functional Specs
2. Creating the View
• HTML Mockup
• Thymeleaf Integration
3. JavaConfig
• ApplicationContext.java
• SpringDataConfig.java
• ThymeleafConfig.java
• ApplicationInitializer.java
4. Layers
• Domain
• Service
• Controller
5. Running the application
• Clone from GitHub
• Create the Database
• Run with Maven and Tomcat 7
• Run with Maven and Jetty 8
• Import to Eclipse
• Validate with W3C

Dependencies

These are the main Maven dependencies:

• Spring 3.2.0.RC1
• Spring Data JPA 1.2.0.RELEASE
• Thymeleaf 2.0.14
• Hibernate 3.6.3.Final
• See pom.xml for full details

Required Tools

These are the minimum required tools:

• Git
• Maven 3.0.4
• MySQL
• Eclipse IDE or SpringSource Tool Suite (STS)

GitHub Repository

There are two versions of the application: a JavaConfig-based and an XML config-based app. Both versions are identical in their feature set.

• spring-thymeleaf-javaconfig
• spring-thymeleaf-xmlconfig

Functional Specs

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Our application's requirements are quite straightforward:

• Create a simple form to manage user information
• Provide the following fields: first name, last name, username, role
• Username must be unique
• Provide CRUD operations
• Provide table to view all users

Here's our Use Case diagram:

[User]-(Add)
[User]-(View)
[User]-(Update)
[User]-(Delete)

//http://yuml.me/

Here's a screenshot of our working application:

Next

In the next section, we will focus on the view layer. We'll start writing the HTML mockup template; then we'll integrate it with Thymeleaf. Click here to proceed.