When building Spring controllers, it is often useful to access a DAO instance which has been set up in applicationContext.xml. To do so, add a variable in the controller for the DAO as well as a setter for it. Once this is done, wire it up by reference in dispatcher-servlet.xml.
Often when working with Spring Web MVC mappings I want all calls to a certain extension handled by a generic resolver, i.e. mapping "*.html" to corresponding "*.jsp" entries in WEB-INF. This is easily done using UrlFilenameViewController which automatically passes the parsed filename to the view resolver.