What is the difference between ApplicationContext and WebApplicationContext in Spring MVC?

Question

What is the difference between Application Context and Web Application Context?

I am aware that WebApplicationContext is used for Spring MVC architectur

Answer 1

Going back to Servlet days, web.xml can have only one , so only one context object gets created when server loads an application and the data in that context is shared among all resources (Ex: Servlets and JSPs). It is same as having Database driver name in the context, which will not change. In similar way, when we declare contextConfigLocation param in Spring creates one Application Context object.

 
      contextConfigLocation
      com.myApp.ApplicationContext
 

You can have multiple Servlets in an application. For example you might want to handle /secure/* requests in one way and /non-seucre/* in other way. For each of these Servlets you can have a context object, which is a WebApplicationContext.

    SecureSpringDispatcher
    org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
    
        contextClass
        com.myapp.secure.SecureContext
    


    SecureSpringDispatcher
    /secure/*


    NonSecureSpringDispatcher
    org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
    
        contextClass
        com.myapp.non-secure.NonSecureContext
    


    NonSecureSpringDispatcher
    /non-secure/*