Spring MVC has always used AntPathMatcher but the use of patterns has grown over time with annotated controllers and URI variables present in most patterns. This is why for WebFlux we introduced PathPatternParser and the parsed PathPattern representation which enables more efficient path matching.

This issue is to add support for using PathPattern in Spring MVC as an alternative to the AntPathMatcher which will also require using a RequestPath, a parsed representation of the request path.