No real documentation on using the spring mvc artifact [SPR-11534]

[spring-projects-issues]

Prashant Deva opened SPR-11534 and commented

Try using spring-mvc in your project. Here is what one runs into:

1. No project on 'spring.io/projects' listed as 'Spring MVC'
2. Look into the 'spring framework' project and it lists 'spring-context' as the artifact to use.
3. using 'spring-context' does NOT include the spring-mvc classes.
4. The spring mvc documentation (http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html) does NOT mention spring-mvc jar file

How is one supposed to discover about the spring-mvc artifact?

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Affects: 4.0.2

Issue Links:

• Spring Web MVC should have its own page on spring.io. [SPR-11781] #16403 Spring Web MVC should have its own page on spring.io. ("is duplicated by")

Referenced from: commits f1849b0, 5490168

0 votes, 7 watchers

[spring-projects-issues]

Brian Clozel commented

Hi Prashant Deva

Thanks for raising this issue - we're always trying to make the documentation better.
To answer all your questions, spring mvc is not a project on its own, but rather a module in the Spring Framework. Spring Framework, as you know, is a base for many application types - so we just added the context module as an example in the projects page; Spring MVC has many app examples as starting points in the guides (here is a REST guide with spring mvc).

We do not list jar files in the reference documentation, since dependency management tools are strongly recommended by the Spring team.

Thanks,

[spring-projects-issues]

Prashant Deva commented

1. a dependency management tool like maven or gradle requires the name of the artifact. spring-mvc in this case.
2. the REST guide uses spring boot and refers to a boot specific artifact, not spring-mvc.
3. things are made more confusing cause the 'modules' documentation you pointed to (http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/overview.html#overview-web) says things like:
   "The Web-Servlet module contains Spring’s model-view-controller"...
   How is one supposed to know that the artifact name is spring-mvc and not spring-webservlet or spring-web ??

So back to my original question:
How is one supposed to discover the spring-mvc artifact?

[spring-projects-issues]

Brian Clozel commented

Good point.
I'll update the modules overview to reflect that.

Would you expect to see that information somewhere else as well?

[spring-projects-issues]

Rossen Stoyanchev commented

Prashant has a point. Let's make some updates on spring.io and in the documentation to make it easier to find that Spring MVC is included in the Spring Framework.

[spring-projects-issues]

Prashant Deva commented

Ideally:

1. There should be a list of each module along with a description of it. For example, I still don't know spring-context module is. And if it's not considered 'spring framework' as you say, why is it listed as the artifact on the spring project page.

2. The list should be not just in the docs but also on the spring framework project page since that is the starting point for most people.

[spring-projects-issues]

Brian Clozel commented

My first attempts in the current documentation did not integrate well and would probably confuse more than solve the issue you're describing.
I've just delayed this issue, since this required some (much needed) changes that I think belong to documentation efforts scheduled for 4.1.

[spring-projects-issues]

Prashant Deva commented

You do realize that this currently make spring mvc an undocumented feature of spring...
I would raise the priority on this if I were you.

[spring-projects-issues]

Adam Berlin commented

The Spring Framework box on the projects page (http://spring.io/projects) should also include the green triangle indicating that there are sub-projects. When visiting projects with sub-projects on spring.io (http://projects.spring.io/spring-data/), then you can choose which sub-project (http://projects.spring.io/spring-data-jpa/) you want to know more about, and then read documentation about the sub-project.

When I pull in the spring-web and spring-webmvc dependencies using spring-boot-starter-web, what do I get?

[spring-projects-issues]

Brian Clozel commented

The reference documentation can be improved in many ways (and may be more broadly revisited in a future release); in the meantime, here are the changes in the documentation:

• the Modules section of the reference documentation has been updated with the actual maven/gradle artifacts
• the projects page has been updated with a link to this section of the documentation

Adam Berlin - I see why you're suggesting this. But for spring-data, those are actual separate projects (separate repositories and builds), whereas here we're talking about modules in the Spring Framework Project. With the Spring IO platform, single projects and umbrella projects (such as Spring Data) in the Spring portfolio, I'd really like to avoid confusion here... I do agree though, there's definitely a lot of room for improvement in that space. More guides? A new, dedicated section in a revisited reference documentation?