Question

Is it necessary to keep Spring MVC in the classpath for developing RESTful web services?

Answer 1

Yes. Spring MVC needs to be on the classpath of the application while developing RESTful web services using Spring. This is because, the Spring MVC provides the necessary annotations like @RestController, @RequestBody, @PathVariable, etc. Hence the spring-mvc.jar needs to be on the classpath or the corresponding Maven entry in the pom.xml.