How to serve .html files with Spring

Background of the problem

First thing to understand is following: it is NOT spring which renders the jsp files. It is JspServlet (org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet) which does it. This servlet comes with Tomcat (jasper compiler) not with spring. This JspServlet is aware how to compile jsp page and how to return it as html text to the client. The JspServlet in tomcat by default only handles requests matching two patterns: *.jsp and *.jspx.

Now when spring renders the view with InternalResourceView (or JstlView), three things really takes place:

1. get all the model parameters from model (returned by your controller handler method i.e. "public ModelAndView doSomething() { return new ModelAndView("home") }")
2. expose these model parameters as request attributes (so that it can be read by JspServlet)
3. forward request to JspServlet. RequestDispatcher knows that each *.jsp request should be forwarded to JspServlet (because this is default tomcat's configuration)

When you simply change the view name to home.html tomcat will not know how to handle the request. This is because there is no servlet handling *.html requests.

Solution

How to solve this. There are three most obvious solutions:

1. expose the html as a resource file
2. instruct the JspServlet to also handle *.html requests
3. write your own servlet (or pass to another existing servlet requests to *.html).

For complete code examples how to achieve this please reffer to my answer in another post: How to map requests to HTML file in Spring MVC?

The initial problem is that the the configuration specifies a property suffix=".jsp" so the ViewResolver implementing class will add .jsp to the end of the view name being returned from your method.

However since you commented out the InternalResourceViewResolver then, depending on the rest of your application configuration, there might not be any other ViewResolver registered. You might find that nothing is working now.

Since .html files are static and do not require processing by a servlet then it is more efficient, and simpler, to use an <mvc:resources/> mapping. This requires Spring 3.0.4+.

For example:

<mvc:resources mapping="/static/**" location="/static/" />

which would pass through all requests starting with /static/ to the webapp/static/ directory.

So by putting index.html in webapp/static/ and using return "static/index.html"; from your method, Spring should find the view.

I'd just add that you don't need to implement a controller method for that as you can use the view-controller tag (Spring 3) in the servlet configuration file:

<mvc:view-controller path="/" view-name="/WEB-INF/jsp/index.html"/>