How to use spring MVC's tag in a java application context?

Question

I have created \'for now\' a simple and basic spring web application. I am used to have a deployment descriptor as a simple web.xml file, and then an application context as

Answer 1

After using hours searching on the internet reading about Spring MVC 3 using only java files I fell over some articles which used an approach by extending from WebMvcConfigurationSupport class, and then overriding 2 methods - addResourceHandler( ResourceHandlerRegistry ) and ResourceHandlerMapping().

My new Application context now look like this.

package dk.chakula.config;

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.HandlerMapping;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.EnableWebMvc;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.ResourceHandlerRegistry;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.WebMvcConfigurationSupport;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.handler.AbstractHandlerMapping;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.view.UrlBasedViewResolver;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesConfigurer;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles2.TilesView;

/**
 *
 * @author martin
 * @since 12-01-2013
 * @version 1.0
 */
@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
@ComponentScan("dk.chakula.web")
public class ChakulaWebConfigurationContext extends WebMvcConfigurationSupport {

    @Override
    public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
        registry.addResourceHandler("/resources/**").addResourceLocations("/resources/");
    }

    @Override
    @Bean
    public HandlerMapping resourceHandlerMapping() {
        AbstractHandlerMapping handlerMapping = (AbstractHandlerMapping) super.resourceHandlerMapping();
        handlerMapping.setOrder(-1);
        return handlerMapping;
    }

    @Bean
    public TilesConfigurer setupTilesConfigurer() {
        TilesConfigurer configurer = new TilesConfigurer();
        String[] definitions = {"/layout/layout.xml"};
        configurer.setDefinitions(definitions);
        return configurer;
    }

    @Bean
    public UrlBasedViewResolver setupTilesViewResolver() {
        UrlBasedViewResolver viewResolver = new UrlBasedViewResolver();
        viewResolver.setViewClass(TilesView.class);
        return viewResolver;
    }

} //End of class ChakulaWebConfigurationContext

As I understood We had to override addResourceHandler, to add the location and the mapping of resources to the registry. Thereafter we needed a bean which returned an object of HandlerMapping. The order of this HandlerMapping should be set to -1, because as I could read from the spring documentation, then -1 means

HandlerMapping ordered at Integer.MAX_VALUE-1 to serve static resource requests.

My application can now load the css files and images into their views, and I wanted to enlighten you others with the answer so, people in the future could get benefit of this.