title: Spring MVC - URL display in browser and Encoding support
body: <p>This might be an obvious question. But am not able to figure it out so far.</p>
  
  <p>In my Spring application, I make a GET request to the following url</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.example.com/firstpage" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/firstpage</a></p>
  
  <p>This request goes to the front controller where I have a request mapping as below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>@RequestMapping(value = "/firstpage")
  public String handlerMethod(HttpServletRequest request, HttpSession session)
          throws CustomException {
          ...
          return "secondpage";
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This "secondpage" corresponds to secondpage.jsp and its contents are correctly displayed.
  But the problem is the browser URL still displays</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.example.com/firstpage" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/firstpage</a></p>
  
  <p>Why is this happening? Any suggestions as to how to make the browser URL change?
  Also does Spring have any default support for encoding URL ?</p>