Spring ApplicationContext - Resource leak: 'context' is never closed

Question

In a spring MVC application, I initialize a variable in one of the service classes using the following approach:

ApplicationContext context = 
         new C         


        

Answer 1

close() is not defined in ApplicationContext interface.

The only way to get rid of the warning safely is the following

ClassPathXmlApplicationContext ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(...);
try {
    [...]
} finally {
    ctx.close();
}

Or, in Java 7

try(ClassPathXmlApplicationContext ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(...)) {
    [...]
}

The basic difference is that since you instantiate the context explicitly (i.e. by use of new) you know the class you are instantiating, so you can define your variable accordingly.

If you were not instantiating the AppContext (i.e. using the one provided by Spring) then you couldn't close it.