Does spring have a way to load up things when the application first loads? At a global level

Question

Is there any spring specific way in the framework to perform initialization when MVC loads up?

Say I need to create global objects based on configuration files, is there a place to do this or do I just create my own servlet and do this in oninit?

Answer 1

What about standard @PostConstruct?

@Service
class AnySpringBean {

    @PostConstruct
    public void init() {
        //run when bean is created
    }

}

Works on @Controllers as well.

UPDATE: The more global place would be to subclass ContextLoaderListener) and override contextInitialized() and use it in web.xml (see user1076371 answer). I don't like this approach much, but at least the initialization is not tied to any Spring bean.