Maven dependency spring-web vs spring-webmvc

Question

What is the difference between the following dependencies?

<dependency>     <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>     <artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>     <version>3.1.2.RELEASE</version> </dependency> 

vs

<dependency>     <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>     <artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>     <version>3.1.2.RELEASE</version> </dependency> 

If I include spring-webmvc alone then spring-web is implicitly added.

When should we use spring-web alone?

Answer 1

spring-web provides core HTTP integration, including some handy Servlet filters, Spring HTTP Invoker, infrastructure to integrate with other web frameworks and HTTP technologies e.g. Hessian, Burlap.

spring-webmvc is an implementation of Spring MVC. spring-webmvc depends on on spring-web, thus including it will transitively add spring-web. You don't have to add spring-web explicitly.

You should depend only on spring-web if you don't use Spring MVC but want to take advantage of other web-related technologies that Spring supports.

Answer 2

From the official doc: The spring-web module provides basic web-oriented integration features such as multipart file upload functionality and the initialization of the IoC container using Servlet listeners and a web-oriented application context. It also contains an HTTP client and the web-related parts of Spring’s remoting support.

The spring-webmvc module (also known as the Web-Servlet module) contains Spring’s model-view-controller (MVC) and REST Web Services implementation for web applications. Spring’s MVC framework provides a clean separation between domain model code and web forms and integrates with all of the other features of the Spring Framework.

The spring-webmvc-portlet module (also known as the Web-Portlet module) provides the MVC implementation to be used in a Portlet environment and mirrors the functionality of the Servlet-based spring-webmvc module.

https://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/4.3.22.RELEASE/spring-framework-reference/htmlsingle/#overview-web