How to avoid hard linking Frontend assets In Spring MVC

I am new to spring MVC coming with experience using PHP MVC frameworks and ROR. I am having a hard time finding the appropriate way to organize and include front end assets into the view templates.

Here is the default code Roo produces for the default style sheet:

<spring:theme code="styleSheet" var="roo_css"/> 
<spring:url value="/${roo_css}" var="roo_css_url"/>  
<spring:url value="/static/images/favicon.ico" var="favicon" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="${roo_css_url}"></link>

This seems totally unnecessary to me. We are calling a variable from the spring:theme code list. Assigning it to a variable in the view sc开发者_Python百科ope/ and then calling that view variable for the

Ideally I would like to have some path tokens like: ${imagePage}, ${stylePath}, etc. That we could drop in and use for soft linking.

Hopefully somebody can point me to some quality SpringMVC documentation or give some examples. Thanks

Update:

I have seen a few examples and engfer has posted one below that suggest using the spring tags within the html to ouput the href like so

<a href="<spring:url url='/about'/ />">About</a>

This would be acceptable however I am getting the following error from jetty

Caused by: org.apache.jasper.JasperException: /WEB-INF/views/footer.jspx(6,22) The value of attribute "href" associated with an element type "null" must not contain the '<' character.

Am I missing something with the encoding? or DTD?

Update:

So apparently the in-line href style only works with .jsp files as .jspx (What im using) is strict xml. What are the benefits of .jspx over .jsp and

The code you have provided from Roo is a little unnecessary. If you look at the Spring MVC documentation as tkeE2036 pointed out... you will see the themes section http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-themeresolver

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<spring:theme code='styleSheet'/>" type="text/css"/>

The Spring theme tag gives you the ability to internationalize your CSS/images/js (imagine an image that has the word 'Hello' which needs to be changed for English/Spanish/etc) into separate internationalized theme files that follow the http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/ResourceBundle.html convention and Spring will automatically resolve the correct resource bundled theme.

If you still want your ${imagePath} or whatever, you can use the <spring:url/> tag to get your job done.

<spring:url value="/images" var="imagePath"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="${imagePath}/foo.png" type="text/css"/>