Project structure to use jquery ajax in spring mvc using json data in eclipse - json

Question

I am new to spring mvc. I have a lot of doubts to be cleared before i can continue.
I want to create a simple application wherein an employee details such as name age phone etc is entered and through ajax call the form data has to be to sent to server using json. For server side i am using spring. And the submitted data has to be shown in a jquery data table. And again to retrieve data an ajax call has to be used to get the data as a json. And no binding tool like jackson should be used.
1.) how do i go about creating an application in eclipse. If i should do a simpel java project or a dynamic web project?
2.) Could any one pls provide a sample code of each of the steps.
Thank you in advance

Answer 1

First, I think it's easier to start with Maven, create a WAR project, and use that to generate the Eclipse project files, which you can then import. This has the advantage of allowing Maven to not only create the correct folder structure, but also let it manage your dependencies. There are plugins for Eclipse that help you work with Maven, and you should be able to find lots of How-Tos using Google. Otherwise, you would have to create a project type that generates the WAR, one of which I believe is a Web Project, and layout the folder structure manually.
After you have the proper folder layout, you will need to setup your web.xml to enable Spring, add your Java classes and view files (html, jsps, whatever), and build a WAR. The final step would be to deploy that WAR to a web container of some sort, like maybe Tomcat or Jetty. You can ether run it externally, or configure Eclipse to deploy and launch your WAR in the IDE directly. I prefer the latter approach, as it makes it easier to setup debugging, not that running it external makes it impossible.
In addition, I would recommend adding the Spring pluggins to Eclipse, or just download their STS (Spring Tool Suite), which is just Eclipse with all the Spring plugins already added and configured. STS has the bonus of already having tcServer available, which is Spring Source's flavor of Tomcat. Again, loads of how-tos available on how to do all of this.
Edit to answer first comment
I don't know if I can address your comment here fully, as it's a very broad request. You are basically asking how do I write a full application using jQuery and Spring MVC. The volumes of books dedicated to this subject, as well as many websites you could visit that give tutorials on how to start developing. In fact, I think the Spring website has a tutorial for building their demo Pet Clinic site using Spring MVC. What I will try to do is give you some direction on what you should be asking.
Spring MVC, as the name suggests, is a Model-View-Controller framework that leverages the Spring Framework. I will not attempt to go into any great detail, as again there are volumes of books out there on the subject of Spring and all its wonders, but in general Spring MVC wants an application broken into the following chunks:
1. The Model
These are the objects you are using to represent your "data". This can be data from a Database, flat file, some other web service call, or maybe just passed around in your Controller. You will hear them commonly referred to as domain objects or entities to name a few. But, no matter how you refer to them they are typically POJO (Plain Old Java Objects) Java Beans with no real business logic, who's only existence is to represent some "data" and how it relates to other "data".
Some people prefer to have this object know how to read/write itself to its data store, some people like to have an external object that is only used to handle the read/writes. These are sometime referred to as a DAO (Data Access Object) or a Repository. There are also frameworks you can use for dealing with this stuff, like Hibernate or JPA for databases.
2. The Service Layer
This isn't represented in the MVC acronym, and one might argue this is part of the "Controller", but it's usually a good idea to put your business logic into a service layer. This is typically a POJO class that has methods to do the things you need to do with your Model objects. It houses your business logic so all the business rules are in one place. These are usually split to represent business functions. For instance, if you had an application dealing with car purchases you might have one service class to deal with the User related functions (create a user, update a password, get his preferences), one to deal with inventory (what is in stock, what is on its way, what is the current sales price), and one to deal with making a purchase (validate the customer's credit, start the tag process, etc). Its also common for these services to have reference to each other. For instance, the User service above might use the Inventory service to get a list of VIN numbers for cars Bill sold last week.
3. The Controller
The controller is what glues the "view" to the service layer. It provides the mapping of the URLs in your app to the function(s) they perform in the service layer. Most people try not to clutter the Controller object with too much code, and try to push as much down into the Service layer as they can. But, as long as it's simple logic I personally don't mind having a tad bit of code in the Controller.
4. The View
This is what you are sending to the user. It may be a web page backed by a JSP. It may be an Excel spreadsheet report generated from user input. It may be a simple JSON response to a REST call. It's sort of "the sky's the limit" here. But, for the most part this is either a JSP view or a JSON or XML response from a web service call.
Now to address your comment more directly...
Since you are a novice, I would recommend one of 3 approaches:
Go get a book...do what the book says to do. There are tons out there. Find one that has a good walk-through of a project, and copy/paste their procedures. A good book will usually have a chapter on how to setup all the necessary tools (Eclipse, Tomcat/Jetty, etc)
Find a good how-to on the Internet. There are lots of people that have tutorials. Find one and copy/paste their procedures.
Use something like Spring Roo. Spring Roo is a code generation tool that can be used to build a fully working site with little to no code. I am a big fan of Roo, especially for lone developers not working in a team, as it can generate a TON of the boiler plate code most developers hate to write. It also does things in a very Spring-like fashion, since after all it was created by the Spring folks.
These will get you past the "how do I create the project in Eclipse" problem. Part 2 of question one is a little more tricky. I would say, for now, don't focus on AJAX and stuff. Focus on simply understanding how Spring MVC works. The problem is, you are basically trying to cram 10 things down at once. Spring MVC is hard enough to get your head wrapped around (the annotations, JSTL, EL, and the Spring custom tag libraries, not to mention all the other things you will probably be touching like Spring Data, etc), but then you want to add dynamic web pages, which is JavaScript (and most likely some framework like jQuery), and to cap it off you don't want to use anything like Jackson (not sure why, but ok...) to help ease the transition from Java to JavaScript. That's a tall order. Again, I would cut out AJAX/JavaScript stuff at first, get a good handle on how a SIMPLE application is built, and then you can jump into all the dynamic stuff.
For the last question, providing code samples, I would point you to mkyong's fantastic blog full of Spring-related tutorials as well as Spring's own Tutorial site and Spring's Sample site as a good starting point.