title: Spring MVC controller reached but I still get 404
body: <p>I have a pretty basic spring mvc web app set up, and this is the begining/section in question from my controller class</p>
  
  <pre><code>@Controller
  public class MainController {
  
      @Autowired
      AssetDAO assetDAO;
  
      @RequestMapping("/")
      public String home() {
      System.out.println("HERE!");
      return "index";
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and my index.jsp file</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;%@page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" paegeEncoding="UTF-8"%&gt;
  
  &lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "~//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"   "http://www.w3.org.TR.html4/loose.dtd"&gt;
  
  &lt;html&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
      &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"&gt;
      &lt;title&gt; Welcome Page &lt;/title&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  
  &lt;body&gt;
      &lt;div&gt;
          &lt;h1&gt; Asset Tracking Web App Test &lt;/h1&gt;
          &lt;a href="EmployeeList"&gt;Get Employee Records&lt;/a&gt;
      &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/body&gt;
  
  
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but when I access <code>localhost:8080/</code> I get a <code>404</code> error. however the message  <code>HERE</code> gets printed</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: I added an application.properties file to my src/main/resources folder which fixed the issue... My question now is, how is this different from using an InternalViewResolver?? or is my understanding of this just wrong??</p>
  
  <p>EDIT2: the file structure of the project is as follows</p>
  
  <pre><code>.
  ├── pom.xml
  ├── src
  │   └── main
  │       ├── java
  │       │   └── com
  │       │       └── assetTracking
  │       │           ├── App.java
  │       │           ├── AssetDAO.java
  │       │           ├── Employee.java
  │       │           └── MainController.java
  │       ├── resources
  │       │   └── application.properties
  │       └── webapp
  │           └── WEB-INF
  │               ├── jsp
  │               │   ├── employeeList.jsp
  │               │   └── index.jsp
  │               └── views.xml
  ├── tableCreatiosn.sql
  ├── tableEntries
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>leaving out all the dependency directories for brevity. Having the files sugggested by yates did not solve the problem. replacing them with application.properties does however</p>
  
  <pre><code>application.properties
  spring.mvc.view.prefix: /WEB-INF/jsp/
  spring.mvc.view.suffix: .jsp
  
  welcome.message: Hello Test
  </code></pre>