Use Twitter Bootstrap in Spring Boot

Objective of post
Create a Spring Boot project
Declare pom.xml
Resource Handler
Controller
Views

1. Objective of post

Before starting the lesson, let's take a few minutes to understand Bootstrap:

The Bootstrap is a HTML, CSS & JavaScript Framework allowing designing and developing the "Responsive Web Mobile" applications. The Bootstrap includes HTML templates, CSS templates & Javascript and basis and available things such as: typography, forms, buttons, tables, navigation, modals, image carousels and others. The Bootstrap also has Javascript Plugins, which helps the designing of your Web Reponsive to be more easier and quicker.

The Bootstrap is developed by the Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter. It was published as an open resource code in August 2011 on GitHub.

See more:
Introduction to Bootstrap

In this post, I am going to show you how to create a Spring Boot application using the Bootstrap. And because the Bootstrap is a Html, Css, Javascript Framework , you use any technology for the View layer (JSP, Thymeleaf, Freemarker, ...).

The contents to be mentioned in this lesson:

Create a Spring Boot application.
Declare necessary libraries so that you can use the Bootstrap.
Create a simple page using UI Components provided by the Bootstrap.

2. Create a Spring Boot project

3. Declare pom.xml

The Bootstrap has been packaged into a small, beautiful Jar file. To use it, you only need to declare it in the pom.xml, and so you are ready to work with the Bootstrap Framework.

** Bootstrap **

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.webjars/jquery -->
<dependency>
   <groupId>org.webjars</groupId>
   <artifactId>jquery</artifactId>
   <version>3.3.1-1</version>
</dependency>

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.webjars/popper.js -->
<dependency>
   <groupId>org.webjars</groupId>
   <artifactId>popper.js</artifactId>
   <version>1.14.1</version>
</dependency>

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.webjars/bootstrap -->
<dependency>
   <groupId>org.webjars</groupId>
   <artifactId>bootstrap</artifactId>
   <version>4.1.1</version>
</dependency>

The full contents of the pom.xml file:

pom.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
    http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">

    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>org.o7planning</groupId>
    <artifactId>SpringBootBootstrap</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>jar</packaging>

    <name>SpringBootBootstrap</name>
    <description>Spring Boot + Bootstrap</description>

    <parent>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
        <version>2.0.0.RELEASE</version>
        <relativePath /> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
    </parent>

    <properties>
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
        <project.reporting.outputEncoding>UTF-8</project.reporting.outputEncoding>
        <java.version>1.8</java.version>
    </properties>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf</artifactId>
        </dependency>

        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.webjars/jquery -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.webjars</groupId>
            <artifactId>jquery</artifactId>
            <version>3.3.1-1</version>
        </dependency>

        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.webjars/popper.js -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.webjars</groupId>
            <artifactId>popper.js</artifactId>
            <version>1.14.1</version>
        </dependency>

        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.webjars/bootstrap -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.webjars</groupId>
            <artifactId>bootstrap</artifactId>
            <version>4.1.1</version>
        </dependency>


        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

</project>

4. Resource Handler

The data resources of the Bootstrap are packaged in the Jar file. You need to expose them so that they can be accessed by paths, for example:

http://somedomain/SomeContextPath/jquery/jquery.min.css
http://somedomain/SomeContextPath/popper/popper.min.js
http://somedomain/SomeContextPath/bootstrap/css/bootstrap.min.css
http://somedomain/SomeContextPath/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js

WebMvcConfig.java

package org.o7planning.sbbootstrap.config;
 
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.ResourceHandlerRegistry;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.WebMvcConfigurer;
 
@Configuration
public class WebMvcConfig implements WebMvcConfigurer {
 
    @Override
    public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
        //
        // Access Bootstrap static resource:
        //
 
        //
        // http://somedomain/SomeContextPath/jquery/jquery.min.css
        //
        registry.addResourceHandler("/jquery/**") //
                .addResourceLocations("classpath:/META-INF/resources/webjars/jquery/3.3.1-1/");
 
        //
        // http://somedomain/SomeContextPath/popper/popper.min.js
        //
        registry.addResourceHandler("/popper/**") //
                .addResourceLocations("classpath:/META-INF/resources/webjars/popper.js/1.14.1/umd/");
 
        // http://somedomain/SomeContextPath/bootstrap/css/bootstrap.min.css
        // http://somedomain/SomeContextPath/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js
        //
        registry.addResourceHandler("/bootstrap/**") //
                .addResourceLocations("classpath:/META-INF/resources/webjars/bootstrap/4.1.1/");
 
    }
 
}

5. Controller

HelloWorldController.java

package org.o7planning.sbbootstrap.controller;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.ui.Model;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;

@Controller
public class HelloWorldController {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String helloWorld(Model model) {
        return "index";
    }

}

6. Views

index.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org">
   <head>
      <meta charset="UTF-8"/>
      <title>Twitter Bootstrap Example</title>
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
      
      <!-- See configuration in WebMvConfig.java -->
      <link th:href="@{/bootstrap/css/bootstrap.min.css}"
                rel="stylesheet" media="screen"/>
                
       
      <script th:src="@{/jquery/jquery.min.js}"></script>  
      <script th:src="@{/popper/popper.min.js}"></script>  
      <script th:src="@{/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js}"></script>   
         
   </head>
   
   <body>
         
      <h2>Hello Twitter Bootstrap</h2>
      
      <div class="btn-group">
            <button type="button" class="btn btn-success">This is a success button</button>
            <button type="button" class="btn btn-warning">This is a warning button</button>
            <button type="button" class="btn btn-danger">This is a danger button</button>
     </div>
   </body>
   
</html>

And this is the image of website with the UI Components of the Bootstrap: