How to register Spring @Configuration annotated class instead of applicationContext.xml file in web.xml?
In web.xml you need to bootstrap the context with AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext:
<servlet> <servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class> <init-param> <param-name>contextClass</param-name> <param-value> org.springframework.web.context.support.AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext </param-value> </init-param> <init-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value> org.package.YouConfigurationAnnotatedClass </param-value> </init-param></servlet>And don't forget to use @EnableWebMvc for your MVC annotations to kick in.
further reading:
EDIT as a "comments follow up" => to be Turing Complete:
Yes of course you need a listener. Although the above completely answers the question "How to register Spring @Configuration annotated class instead of applicationContext.xml file in web.xml", here is an example from Spring official documentation that layouts the full web.xml:
<web-app> <!-- Configure ContextLoaderListener to use AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext instead of the default XmlWebApplicationContext --> <context-param> <param-name>contextClass</param-name> <param-value> org.springframework.web.context.support.AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext </param-value> </context-param> <!-- Configuration locations must consist of one or more comma- or space-delimited fully-qualified @Configuration classes. Fully-qualified packages may also be specified for component-scanning --> <context-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value>com.acme.AppConfig</param-value> </context-param> <!-- Bootstrap the root application context as usual using ContextLoaderListener --> <listener> <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class> </listener> <!-- Declare a Spring MVC DispatcherServlet as usual --> <servlet> <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name> <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class> <!-- Configure DispatcherServlet to use AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext instead of the default XmlWebApplicationContext --> <init-param> <param-name>contextClass</param-name> <param-value> org.springframework.web.context.support.AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext </param-value> </init-param> <!-- Again, config locations must consist of one or more comma- or space-delimited and fully-qualified @Configuration classes --> <init-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value>com.acme.web.MvcConfig</param-value> </init-param> </servlet> <!-- map all requests for /app/* to the dispatcher servlet --> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/app/*</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping></web-app>
Bumping up an old question here, but with recent versions of Spring (v3.0+) now you can get rid of web.xml altogether, provided you are deploying your app on a web container that supports Servlet 3.0+.
One can implement Spring's WebApplicationInitializer interface to do the same configurations that one would do in web.xml. This implementation class will be automatically detected by Spring 3.0+ app running on Servlet 3.0+ containers.
If the set up is rather simple, you could instead use another class provided by Spring as shown below. All one does here is to set the @Configuration classes and list out the servlet mappings. Keeps the setup extremely simple.
public class WebInit extends AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer{ @Override protected Class<?>[] getRootConfigClasses() { return null; } @Override protected Class<?>[] getServletConfigClasses() { return new Class[] {AppConfig.class}; } @Override protected String[] getServletMappings() { return new String[] { "*.html" ,"*.json" ,"*.do"}; }}