In Windchill 9.x, for JCA Clients, JSP was serving both as the Controller and View. In Windchill 10.0, we are introducing a clear separation between Controller and View for which we are using Spring MVC Framework.

The primary motivation for this move is to enable our components to be both requested by and rendered to any client technologies. The MVC pattern is a well understood industry standard approach that allows us to better leverage 3rd-party technologies and training. Finally, the MVC pattern improves the maintainability and testability of our implementations.

Having multiple servlets as controllers is going to be difficult to manage and hence we have adopted the Front Controller pattern approach – a main servlet to make the control more manageable. DispatcherServlet acts as the Front controller.