Spring Portlet MVC
The Spring Portlet MVC framework provides a complete MVC layer for the JSR-168 Portlet API in the same way that Spring Web MVC does for the Servlet API. Wherever possible the APIs and capabilities are the same between the two frameworks. However, unlike most other portlet MVC frameworks, the unique workflow of the JSR-168 API is completely preserved, including the separation of the ActionRequest and the RenderRequest.
Downloads
Spring Portlet MVC has been part of the core Spring Framework since the 2.0 release.
Using Spring 2.0, the spring-portlet.jar file from the dist/extmodules directory needs to be included in your webapp libraries along with either dist/spring.jar or a number of libraries from dist/modules. Using Spring 2.5, the modules have been reorganized and the library has been renamed spring-webmvc-portlet.jar and also requires spring-webmvc.jar.
Documentation
The framework is fully documented as part of the Spring Framework Reference Manual – see "Chapter 16. Portlet MVC Framework". Full Javadocs are also included along with the Spring Framework API. Make sure that you are familiar with Spring Web MVC and the JSR-168 Specification before working with Spring Portlet MVC.
Samples
There is a small sample webapp for use with the current framework. It demonstrates a lot of the uniqueness of the Spring Portlet MVC framework and provides a good template for starting a new Spring Portlet project. The sample is available for download here . The full source code development/build environment for the sample application is now also available for download here. It already has the deployment changes needed for Pluto so that it can be directly tested using the Pluto Portal Driver without having to create and deploy a war file each time you make changes. You'll see that there are two web.xml files: one called 'web.xml' that has already been modified to work with Pluto, and one called 'web.dist.xml' that is used for generating the generic war file. Be sure to review the included readme.txt file for information on installing the webapp into your environment.
There is also now a small sample application included with the Spring Framework distribution itself. See the samples/petportal directory in the distribution for more information.
Questions
If you have questions about using Spring Portlet MVC, please post them in the Spring Framework Support Forums, specifically in the "Web" forum.
There is also a Frequently Asked Questions area available here for Spring Portlet MVC – please review it before posting your questions.
Bugs & Enhancements
Please enter any bugs or enhancement requests into the Spring JIRA Issue Tracker. Use the Spring Framework (SPR) project and the "SpringWEB" component for your issues. Please be sure to mention that this is a Portlet issue.
Feedback
Please send any other feedback on Spring Portlet MVC or on this site directly to me: jlewis -|AT|- unicon -|DOT|- net
Thanks for trying out the Spring Portlet MVC Framework!
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Recent News
Since I just answered this questions in the forums, I thought I would post the same information here. I expect that there will be JSR 286 support in Spring Portlet MVC as part of Spring 3.0. As for a likely release date, you'll have to bug Juergen for that. 
We had been hoping to do the development and testing using the Pluto 2.0 portlet container, since that is slated to be the reference implementation for the spec. However,...
I can't believe it's been well over a year since I updated this page. While there has been a lot of great work going on in the background using and evolving Spring Portlet MVC, there hasn't been much to post here for a while – I guess that speaks to how stable the framework has become. Thanks to everyone for all their great questions in the forums – I am tremendously pleased at how widely adopted this framework has become in the niche community of Java Portlet developers....
The first complete draft of the chapter for Spring Framework Reference Manual is now available. It will be included with the RC1 release. Please send any feedback you have about the draft so we can continue to improve it before the final release of Spring 2.0.
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