<mvc:resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/WEB-INF/resources/" />

<mvc:resources location="/resources/" mapping="/resource/**"/>

The location attribute of the tag defines the base directory location of static resources that you want to serve. It can be images path that are available under the src/main/webapp/resources/images/ directory; you may wonder why we have given only /resources/ as the location value instead of src/main/webapp/resources/images/. This is because we consider the resources directory as the base directory for all resources, we can have multiple subdirectories under resources directory to put our images and other static resource files.

The second attribute, mapping, just indicates the request path that needs to be mapped to this resource directory. In our case, we have assigned /resources/** as the mapping value. So, if any web request starts with the /resource request path, then it will be mapped to the resources directory, and the /** symbol indicates the recursive look for any resource files underneath the base resource directory.

So for url like http://localhost:8080/webstore/resource/images/logo.png. So, while serving this web request, Spring MVC will consider /resource/images/logo.png as the request path. So, it will try to map /resource to the resource base directory, resources. From this directory, it will try to look for the remaining path of the URL, which is /images/logo.png. Since we have the images directory under the resources directory, Spring can easily locate the image file from the images directory.