Let's create our first Spring MVC project in STS:

We have successfully created a basic project, but we need to perform one small configuration in our pom.xml file, that is, telling Maven to use Java Version 8 while compiling and building our project. How do we tell Maven to do this? Simply add two property entries in pom.xml. Let's do the following:

We just created the basic project structure. Any Java project follows a certain directory structure to organize its source code and resources. Instead of manually creating the whole directory hierarchy by ourselves, we just handed over that job to STS. By collecting some basic information about our project, such as Group Id, Artifact Id, and the Packaging style, from us, it is clear that STS is smart enough to create the whole project directory structure with the help of the Maven. Actually, what is happening behind the screen is that STS is internally using Maven to create the project structure.

We want our project to be deployable in any servlet container-based web server, such as Tomcat or Jetty, and that's why we selected the Packaging style as war. Finally, you will see the project structure in Package Explorer, as shown in the following screenshot:

The project structure of the application

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.6</version>
            <configuration>

             <failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml>

            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>