creating spring rest services without using spring boot

I've followed the Getting Started tutorial on spring.io for building REEST services

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. The problem is that this tutorial only explain how to produce a standalone running jar with tomcat embedded using spring boot.

Is there a way to create a project from scratch to produce a war to deploy for instance on an already existing tomcat instance?

PS: I had found a previous thread

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on stackoverflow concerning the very same issue. The problem is that the accepted answers and suggestions doesn't exactly solve my problem, since I'm not looking for ways to modify the standalone-app spring boot project so that it works on an external tomcat container, but would like to find a 'cleaner' solution not involving spring boot at all. (I'm not exactly sure how to behave here, being still quite new at stackoverflow. I hope that opening a new question is the correct procedure).

You don't need Spring Boot to create a rest controller.

Please follow the spring framework documentation on how to setup MVC

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The MVC setup (the `DispatcherServlet`) depends on your spring version, you can either use xml or you can setup programmatically:

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Once this is setup, you can add a rest controller to your application. Note that a rest controller (the `@RestController` annotation) is a stereotype annotation that combines `@ResponseBody` and `@Controller`, in other words the Controller returns an object in the response body instead of returning a view.

This is a perfect example explaining what I said above:

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Here is another example:

Directory Layout:

.
├── ./pom.xml
└── ./src
└── ./src/main
├── ./src/main/java
│   └── ./src/main/java/biz
│   └── ./src/main/java/biz/tugay
│   └── ./src/main/java/biz/tugay/restfulspring
│   └── ./src/main/java/biz/tugay/restfulspring/config
│   ├── ./src/main/java/biz/tugay/restfulspring/config/RestfulHello.java
│   └── ./src/main/java/biz/tugay/restfulspring/config/WebAppInitalizer.java
└── ./src/main/webapp
└── ./src/main/webapp/WEB-INF
└── ./src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml

**pom.xml**

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0

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;

<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>biz.tugay</groupId>
<artifactId>restfulSpring</artifactId>

<packaging>war</packaging>
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
<name>restfulSpring Maven Webapp</name>

<url>http://maven.apache.org</url>

<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
<artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>
<version>3.0.1</version>
<scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
<version>4.3.16.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
<version>4.3.16.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>
<version>4.3.16.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>
<version>4.3.16.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>

<build>
<finalName>restfulSpring</finalName>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
<version>3.1</version>
<configuration>
<source>1.7</source>
<target>1.7</target>
</configuration>
</plugin>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.eclipse.jetty</groupId>
<artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>9.2.1.v20140609</version>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>

</project>

**web.xml**

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee

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;
version="3.0">
</web-app>

**WebAppInitalizer.java**

package biz.tugay.restfulspring.config;

import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.EnableWebMvc;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.support.AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer;

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
@ComponentScan("biz.tugay.restfulspring")
public class WebAppInitalizer extends AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer {

@Override
protected String[] getServletMappings() {
return new String[]{"/*"};
}

@Override
protected Class<?>[] getRootConfigClasses() {
return new Class<?>[]{WebAppInitalizer.class};
}

@Override
protected Class<?>[] getServletConfigClasses() {
return new Class[0];
}
}

**RestfulHello.java**

package biz.tugay.restfulspring.config;

import org.springframework.http.HttpHeaders;
import org.springframework.http.HttpStatus;
import org.springframework.http.MediaType;
import org.springframework.http.ResponseEntity;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@RestController
@RequestMapping(value = "/")
public class RestfulHello {

@RequestMapping(value = "hello")
public ResponseEntity<String> sayHello() {
final HttpHeaders httpHeaders= new HttpHeaders();
httpHeaders.setContentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);
return new ResponseEntity<String>("{\"msg\": \"Hello World\"}", httpHeaders, HttpStatus.OK);
}
}

Build and run:

mvn clean install
mvn jetty:start

Test:

> GET /hello HTTP/1.1
> Host: localhost:8080
> User-Agent: insomnia/5.15.0
> Accept: */*
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:06:07 GMT
< Content-Type: application/json
< Content-Length: 22
< Server: Jetty(9.2.1.v20140609)

Content received:

{
"msg": "Hello World"
}