Java Spring MVC Folder / Naming Conventions

Question

I'm trying to determine the best way to organize our Maven / Spring web applications and have been looking around to see examples. Unfortunately, they seem to conflict at certain points.

How should the folders be organized in a Spring MVC webapp and what should they be called?

The big differences I see are:

1. The folder for JSPs.
   • /src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsp/ or
   • /src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/views/
2. The Spring configuration files.
   • /src/main/resources/META-INF/spring/context.xml or
   • /src/main/resources/spring/context.xml or
   • /src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/spring/context.xml
3. Where assets/resources belong.
   • /src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/images/ or
   • /src/main/webapp/resources/images/ (with a urlrewriter)

The SpringSource samples in their SVN repo are not consistent, although their template for an MVC app uses the following:

• /src/main/resources/META-INF/spring/
• /src/main/webapp/resources/
• /src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/views/

I know this sounds like a petty, possibly unimportant issue, but we have a large team of people who are going to be working independently and we need to make a decision to keep everything understandable. We'd like to follow any standards that exist so that Spring developers coming in can easily jump in.

Thank you.

P.S. Yes, I realize that anyone should be able to handle being told "The views are in the jsp folder." without much ado, but I'm going for standards here, people.

Answer 1

I'd go for:

1. The folder for JSPs.

     * /src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsp/
   

2. The Spring configuration files.

     * /src/main/resources/context.xml
   

3. Where assets/resources belong.

     * /src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/images/
   

But it doesn't matter so much actually. Pick whichever you like.