title: Using Spring "forward:" prefix resulting in StackOverflowError
body: <p>I'm attempting to forward a request received from one Controller to a second Controller using Spring's "forward:" prefix. However, instead of forwarding the request on to the second Controller as I would expect, the request is instead handled by the first Controller over and over again (until I receive a StackOverflowError). This made me think it might be treating the "/app/pong" as a relative path of some sort, but I'm not sure why this would be the case. Am I misunderstanding how "forward:" is supposed to work? Is there something that I'm missing here?</p>
  
  <p>Controllers:</p>
  
  <pre><code>@Controller
  public class ControllerOne {
    @RequestMapping(value = "/ping", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public String doPing(HttpServletRequest request) {
      log.debug("Ping?");
      return "forward:/app/pong";
    }
  }
  
  @Controller
  public class ControllerTwo {
    @RequestMapping(value = "/pong", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public String doPong(HttpServletRequest request) {
      log.debug("Pong!");
      return "pong";
    }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>servlet-mapping:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;servlet-mapping&gt;
    &lt;servlet-name&gt;test-servlet&lt;/servlet-name&gt;
    &lt;url-pattern&gt;/app/*&lt;/url-pattern&gt;
  &lt;/servlet-mapping&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>view resolver:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver"&gt;
    &lt;property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/" /&gt;
    &lt;property name="suffix" value=".jsp" /&gt;
  &lt;/bean&gt;
  </code></pre>