If your web application exists in the web server's webapps directory, for example webapps/myapp/ then the root of this application context can be accessed at http://localhost:8080/myapp/ assuming the default Tomcat port. This should work with or without the trailing slash, I think by default - certainly that is the case in Jetty v8.1.5
Once you hit /myapp the Spring DispatcherServlet takes over, routing requests to the <servlet-name> as configured in your web.xml, which in your case is /ui/*.
The DispatcherServlet then routes all requests from http://localhost/myapp/ui/ to the @Controllers.
In the Controller itself you can use @RequestMapping(value = "/*") for the mainPage() method, which will result in both http://localhost/myapp/ui/ and http://localhost/myapp/ui being routed to mainPage().
Note: you should also be using Spring >= v3.0.3 due to SPR-7064
For completeness, here are the files I tested this with:
src/main/java/controllers/UIRootController.java
package controllers;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView;
@Controller
public class UiRootController {
@RequestMapping(value = "/*")
public ModelAndView mainPage() {
return new ModelAndView("index");
}
@RequestMapping(value={"/other"})
public ModelAndView otherPage() {
return new ModelAndView("other");
}
}
WEB-INF/web.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
version="3.0" metadata-complete="false">
<servlet>
<servlet-name>ui</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
<!-- spring automatically discovers /WEB-INF/<servlet-name>-servlet.xml -->
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>ui</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/ui/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>
WEB-INF/ui-servlet.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd">
<context:component-scan base-package="controllers" />
<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver"
p:order="2"
p:viewClass="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView"
p:prefix="/WEB-INF/views/"
p:suffix=".jsp"/>
</beans>
And also 2 JSP files at WEB-INF/views/index.jsp and WEB-INF/views/other.jsp.
Result:
http://localhost/myapp/ -> directory listing
http://localhost/myapp/ui and http://localhost/myapp/ui/ -> index.jsp
http://localhost/myapp/ui/other and http://localhost/myapp/ui/other/ -> other.jsp
Hope this helps!