Do I really need web.xml for a Servlet based Java web application?

Question

I haven\'t been working on real world web projects. At university we used both Servlets and Spring for Java web development. In both projects we were given web.xml files alr

Answer 1

You don't need a web.xml file if you have a container that supports the latest j2ee specs. Here is a link to an simple servlet example that use an annotation and here you can find the same for Spring MVC; I post the example here for you convenience

public class MyWebApplicationInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {

    @Override
    public void onStartup(ServletContext container) {
        ServletRegistration.Dynamic registration = container.addServlet("dispatcher", new DispatcherServlet());
        registration.setLoadOnStartup(1);
        registration.addMapping("/example/*");
    }

}

Here is another link that show how to use the other annotations available(@ServletFilter, @WebServletContextListener); you can download the specs form here in order to get a more detailed view of the annotations available via j2ee.