To configure the front controller servlet, DispatcherServlet, in an XML-based configuration, we need to add the following XML code in the web.xml file:

  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>spring-mvc</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>
      org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
    </servlet-class>
    <init-param>
      <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
      <param-value>/WEB-INF/spring-mvc-context.xml</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
  </servlet>

  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>spring-mvc</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

In the preceding XML code, at first, we configured the DispatcherServlet. Then, we mentioned the context configuration location, /WEB-INF/spring-mvc-context.xml. We set the load-on-startup value as 1, so the servlet container will load this servlet upon startup. In the second part, we defined the servlet-mapping tag to map a URL / to DispatcherServlet. Now, we will define the Spring application context in the next step.