The best way to get started with Spring Web Flow is to evaluate the reference applications included in the release and use them as a guide for implementing your own applications.

Pre-built wars of the reference applications are available for download here:

• swf-booking-mvc.war - Shows Spring MVC, Spring Javascript, Spring Web Flow, and Spring Security working together with JavaServerPages (JSP) and Tiles
• swf-booking-faces.war - Shows Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow, Spring Faces, and Spring Security working together with JavaServerFaces (JSF) and Facelets
• swf-booking-portlet-mvc.war - The booking-mvc application for a Portlet environment
• swf-booking-portlet-faces.war - The booking-faces application for a Portlet environment

The servlet samples have been tested against Tomcat 6.0.  The portlet samples have been tested against Pluto 1.1 with Tomcat 5.5.

You may also build and run the reference applications from the source. To do that:

1. Download the Spring Web Flow release.
2. Expand the release archive.
3. Access the projects/build-spring-webflow directory and run ant.  This will build Web Flow along with the .war files for the sample projects.  The build will take a few minutes to complete since it retrieves the libraries needed to build from the SpringSource Bundle repository.  Please note that ant 1.7 and Java 5 are required to build.
4. If you are using Eclipse, import the sample projects in the spring-webflow-samples directory into your workspace.  These projects are WTP "Dynamic Web Projects" and can be run directly from within Eclipse.  For the projects to compile within Eclipse, you must set the IVY_CACHE classpath variable to point to projects/ivy-cache/repository.
5. Alternatively, you may also simply deploy the built .WAR in a sample's target/artifacts directory to your favorite web container.

The sample is also available on-line for demonstration purposes.