Nandeesh Satishkumar

My understanding is...
In case of a web application one can use the contextLoaderListener to load the spring configuration files. I would prefer this approach as spring does the job for me of creating the Application context. So in this example below...

<!--------- In Web.xml ----------->
<context-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value>/com/test/spring/applicationContext1.xml</param-value> </context-param> <listener> <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class> <!-- For Servlet 2.2 containers and Servlet 2.3 ones that do not initalize listeners before servlets, use ContextLoaderServlet --> </listener>

ContextLoaderListener will look for the param contextConfigLocation and load the configuration files used in the value, in this case applicationContext1. So if later I want to change the path of my applicationContext1.xml I can do it here with out any re-compilation of code required. So internally appContext is created by spring for me.

One has to get hands on to this context to extract the beans of the applicationContext1.xml. One way I think this can be acheived is the use of ApplicationContextAware interface. An example of this usage is given here http://jerlinworld.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/making-your-spring-application-context-aware/. Once access to the context is available one can created a Factory class and using the getBean method on the context beans can be extraceted from applicationContext1.xml.

The usage of getBean is the required glue code between spring and your application. DI is just a concept of injecting resources in to bean so that the bean is avaialble ready to use out of the box.