If you have worked with Spring Mvc then you should know what is a DispatcherServlet? It's actually the heart of Spring MVC, precisely the C of MVC design pattern or Controller. Every single web request which is supposed to be processed by Spring MVC goes through DispatcherServlet. In general, its an implementation of Front Controller Pattern which provides a single point of entry in your application. It handles all incoming requests. It is also the bridge between Java and Spring and DispatcherServlet like any other Servlet is declared in the web.xml with a URL pattern enough to map every single web request to DispathcherServlert.