Spring MVC uses 2 design Patterns Internally

1. Front Controller
2. MVC

How Spring MVC Handles Request

1. Receive the request from client
2. Consult Handle Mapper to decide which controller processes the request
3. Dispatch the request to the controller
4. Controller processes the request and returns the logical view name and model back to DispatcherServlet
5. Consult View Resolver for appropriate View for the logical view name from Controller
6. Pass the model to View implementation for rendering
7. View renders the model and returns the result to DispatcherServlet
8. Return the rendered result from view to the client

MappingHandler
DispatcherServlet uses MappingHandler to find out which controller is right one for this request.There are many MappingHandler implementations which uses different strategies to map the request to Controller. By default DispatcherServlet will use BeanNameUrlHandlerMapping and DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping.

public interface HandlerMapping 
{
      HandlerExecutionChain getHandler(HttpServletRequest request) throws Exception;
}

ViewResolver
With the help of ViewResolver strategy object DispatcherServlet can find out physical view from the logical view name. Similar to MappingHandler there are also many different strategies for resolving the view based on the different view technologies. Most commonly used implementation of ViewResolver is InternalResourceViewResolver.

public interface ViewResolver 
{
      View resolveViewName(String viewName, Locale locale) throws Exception;
}