by Horatiu Dan

Whether they are built using the genuine Spring Framework or Spring Boot, such applications are widely developed and deployed these days. By trying to address simple or complex business challenges, products strongly rely on the used framework features in their attempt to offer elegant solutions. Elegant here means correct, clean and easy to understand and maintain.

In case of a web application, some requests are handled in a way, while others may need extra pre or post processing, or even a change in the initial request. Generally, Servlet Filters are configured and put in force, in order to accommodate such scenarios.

Spring MVC applications, on the other hand, define HandlerInterceptors which are quite similar to Servlet Filters. As per the API reference, a HandlerInterceptor “allows custom pre-processing with the option of prohibiting the execution of the handler itself and custom post-processing”. Usually, a c...