I'm looking for a design solution wherein I have a web application built with Struts 2.0 / Spring / JPA. I'm loading the applicationContext xml file as a context param in my web.xml. In the future if I decide to go for remoteness wherein the web components will have a ServiceLocator that will do the RMI call to the Spring components. My doubt here is what would then happen to the applicationContext?? How to load it now and from where as the web.xml will go along with the client layer of the Spring components.