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 already configured and we were doing only minor changes in them. Now I need to build a web app from a scratch. I created new Servlet class in Eclipse and it didn't automatically create any web.xml. Then I googled, and I read from several resources that web.xml is not really needed, but that reasoning was put in couple of sentences, so I am not sure if using annotations instead of web.xml will be no problem. I will be really glad if there is no need to configure web.xml, because I haven't configured one by myself and I want to focus more on the business logic.

Thank you in advance!

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.