Over the last several months I have worked on several content heavy websites for one of our clients. When I say “content heavy”, I mean that 80%-90% of the pages in the application are static, or at least mostly static, a customer name, membership number, etc may need to be floated in, but not big data tables with dynamic data being pulled from the database. The marketing department manages this content with their content management system and publish fully formed HTML pages (layout, look and feel, etc is controlled in the CMS) which are then pulled into our /WEB-INF/jsp/content directory by our build process.

Our applications treat these HTML pages as JSPs (simple rename in the build script). This lets the marketing team work from a cheat sheet of EL expressions such as ${customerName} and keeps the IT department out of the day to day content management work. One of our goals with these systems was to easily and seamlessly deal with both static pages and very dynamic pages requiring custom controllers to be built. With just a little bit of work Spring MVC makes it easy to provide this functionality and also provides a sane set of defaults for building out these web sites one page at a time.
» Read more: Taking Advantage of Spring MVC’s Default Behavior