The first step to using Spring MVC is to configure the DispatcherServlet in web.xml. You typically do this once per web application.

The example below maps all requests that begin with /spring/ to the DispatcherServlet. An init-param is used to provide the contextConfigLocation. This is the configuration file for the web application.

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>/WEB-INF/web-application-config.xml</param-value>
    </init-param>
</servlet>
	
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/spring/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>