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ContextLoaderListener creates a root web-application-context for the web-application and puts it in the ServletContext. This context can be used to load and unload the spring-managed beans ir-respective of what technology is being used in the controller layer(Struts or Spring MVC).
Whereas DispatcherServlet is expected to load beans containing web components such as controllers, view resolvers, and handler mappings, ContextLoaderListener is expected to load the other beans in your application.
As per my understanding, ContextLoaderListener reads the Spring configuration file (with value given against contextConfigLocation in web. xml), parses it and loads the singleton bean defined in that config file. Similarly when we want to load prototype bean, we will use same webapplication context to load it.
What is WebApplicationContext in Spring MVC? WebApplicationContext in Spring is a web-aware ApplicationContext i.e it has Servlet Context information. In a single web application, there can be multiple WebApplicationContext. That means each DispatcherServlet is associated with a single WebApplicationContext.
In your case, no, there's no reason to keep the ContextLoaderListener and applicationContext.xml. If your app works fine with just the servlet's context, that stick with that, it's simpler.
Yes, the generally-encouraged pattern is to keep non-web stuff in the webapp-level context, but it's nothing more than a weak convention.
The only compelling reasons to use the webapp-level context are:
DispatcherServlet that need to share servicesDelegatingFilterProxy, OpenEntityManagerInViewFilter, etc)None of these apply to you, so the extra complexity is unwarranted.
Just be careful when adding background tasks to the servlet's context, like scheduled tasks, JMS connections, etc. If you forget to add <load-on-startup> to your web.xml, then these tasks won't be started until the first access of the servlet.
You can configure the application context the other way around as well. E.g. in order to make the OpenEntityManagerInViewFilter work. Setup the ContextLoaderListener and then configure your DispatcherServlet with:
<servlet>
<servlet-name>spring-mvc</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value></param-value>
</init-param>
</servlet>
Just make sure that the contextConfigLocation parameter value is empty.
I want to share what I've done on my Spring-MVC application:
On the we-mvc-config.xml I added just the classes annotated with @Controller:
<context:component-scan base-package="com.shunra.vcat">
<context:include-filter expression="org.springframework.stereotype.Controller" type="annotation"/>
</context:component-scan>
On the applicationContext.xml files I added all the rest:
<context:component-scan base-package="com.shunra.vcat">
<context:exclude-filter expression="org.springframework.stereotype.Controller" type="annotation"/>
</context:component-scan>
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