The GreenPages application is divided up into a number of OSGi bundles that are represented as Eclipse projects. In this step the starting version of the greenpages.web project is imported.

Right-click in the Package Explorer view and select Import…. In the dialog that opens, choose General → Existing Projects into Workspace and select Next. In the following dialog set the root directory field to the value of $GREENPAGES_HOME/start/greenpages.web and press Finish.

Initially this project may have compile failures in it; this is to be expected particularly if the Maven repository hasn’t yet been created. This will be corrected in the next step.

When Eclipse finishes importing the project, and building the workspace, go to the next step.

Create a new class by right-clicking on the greenpages.web package in the src/main/java source folder and selecting New → Class. (If Class is not offered on the New menu, then the Java perspective may not be being used. Look for the Class option under Other… in the Java section.) Name the new class GreenPagesController and press Finish.

Next add the following code to the GreenPagesController class.

@Controller
public class GreenPagesController {

    @RequestMapping("/home.htm")
    public void home() {
    }
}

This will not compile because the annotations Controller and RequestMapping are not visible in the class.

Eclipse will offer (as a Quick Fix) to insert imports for Spring Framework annotations Controller and RequestMapping. If it does not, this is because the Maven plug-in fails to detect all the dependencies. To correct this right-click on the greenpages.web project and select the Maven → Update Dependencies menu item.

Eclipse will offer (as a Quick Fix) to insert imports for Spring Framework annotations Controller and RequestMapping (these should be accepted). After these changes, save the file and go to the next step.

Once the controller is written, Spring needs to be told to instantiate a bean of the controller type. In this step you enable Spring’s component scanning to detect the GreenPagesController class.

Open the WEB-INF/spring/greenpages-servlet.xml file in the src/main/webapp folder. This is not a source folder and can not be made into one, navigate to the file starting at the ‘src’ folder. In this file add the following line, after the comment to “enable classpath scanning”.

<context:component-scan base-package="greenpages.web"/>

When this is complete save the file and go to the next step.