// the take
A grab-bag of standalone Spring MVC 5 example projects — hello world, CRUD with Hibernate/JPA, Spring Security, Thymeleaf — each tied to a write-up on javaguides.net. It's aimed at beginners working through Spring MVC fundamentals before they move on to Spring Boot.
Each example is its own small Maven project instead of one sprawling monolith, so you can open just the concept you need (XML config vs Java config vs Spring Boot) without wading through the rest. It walks the actual progression from raw XML servlet config to annotation-based Java config to Spring Boot, which is a genuinely useful way to see what Spring Boot is automating under the hood. Every example is paired with an article explaining the reasoning, not just a code dump.
Pinned to Spring 5.1 and JDK 8; the XML-config and manual-DispatcherServlet examples teach setup patterns nobody writes anymore in 2026. There are no meaningful tests — just a single generated Spring Boot smoke test — so nothing here models how to actually test a controller or repository. Last commit is December 2022, so the pinned dependencies (including Spring Security) aren't getting security patches. It's a tutorial collection, not a library: there's no API surface to depend on, so using it means copying boilerplate rather than adopting a tool.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →