Make ServletContextListener spring aware

Question

I am plugging in Spring to existing Java EE web Application. I have following lines in my web.xml:

    com.MyContextListen         


        

Answer 1

Well,

We had a similar scenario of configuring an exiting Jersey web services app to use Spring for dependency injection. Our Jersey webapp had extended ContextLoaderListener as follow

public class XServletContextListener extends ContextLoaderListener {
    ... 
    @Override
    public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent arg0) {
        super.contextInitialized(arg0);
        ....
    }

    @Override
    public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent arg0) {
        super.contextDestroyed(arg0);
        ....
    }
} 

where ContextLoaderListener is

import org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener;

We included the jersey-spring bridge with all spring dependencies including applicationContext.xml as follow

    
    ....
    ....

And obviously needed to make sure that XServletContextListener is included in the web.xml as follow

    contextConfigLocation
    /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml


    com.xxx.**.XServletContextListener

Followed by servlet and its init-param values and servlet mapping. You can obviously adopt annotation config in place of xml confib in which case you would need to use WebListener annotation.

We use a variety of annotations such as

@Component for objects
@Service for services 
@Repository for DAOs
@Controller for controllers/resources 
@ContextConfiguration for tests

Everything is loaded and autowired by Spring framework.