By the way, if you're planning on returning JSON or some other content type than html, you might want to consider implementing a View to convert the populated ModelAndView to your desired content type.
Assuming you have a BeanNameViewResolver configured in your context
<bean id="beanNameViewResolver"
class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.BeanNameViewR esolver">
<property name="order" value="1" />
</bean>
you could implement a view as follows:
@Component("jsonView")
public class JSONView extends AbstractView {
public static final String NAME = "jsonView";
@Override
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
protected void renderMergedOutputModel(Map model, HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) throws Exception {
JsonConfig config = new JsonConfig();
resp.getOutputStream().print(JSONObject.fromObject (model, config).toString());
resp.getOutputStream().flush();
}
}
Returning "jsonView" from your controller would forward the request to the view class defined above for conversion of the model into JSON and then flushing the content to the output stream. Note that the view is annotated with @Component("jsonView"), this allows the framework to resolve the "jsonView" path returned from your controller (again, this is assuming that you have properly configured a BeanNameViewResolver in your context). You could of course avoid annotations altogether, and register the bean in your context with an id of "jsonView".
On a side note, the view above uses json-lib to generate the JSON:
http://json-lib.sourceforge.net