About multiple containers in spring framework

Question

In a typical Spring MVC project there two \"containers\": One created by ContextLoaderListener and the other created by DispatchServlet.

I want to know, are these re

Answer 1

There aren't two separate containers created. Typically, you want spring to instantiate the object declared in the servlet-context.xml when the object is required. So, you map the servlet-context.xml configuration file to the Dispatcher Servlet i.e. you want to initialize the object when a request hits the dispatcher servlet.

    appServlet
    org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
    
        contextConfigLocation
        /WEB-INF/spring/appServlet/servlet-context.xml
    
    1

Where as, if you want to initialize the object and perform action when the context is being loaded you would declare the configuration file with in the context-param tags of your deployment descriptor.

    contextConfigLocation
    /WEB-INF/spring/root-context.xml

You could test this out by writing by declaring separate beans in the servlet-context.xml and root-context.xml and then, autowiring them in a custom Context Loader Listener class. You would find only the root-context instances are initialized and servlet-context beans are null.