Difference between Application Context Vs Web Application Context

 Basic Difference

ApplicationContext applicationContext.xml is the root context configuration for every web application. Spring loads applicationContext.xml file and creates the ApplicationContext for the    whole application. There will be only one application context per web application.If you are not explicitly declaring the context configuration file name in web.xml using the contextConfigLocation param, Spring will search for the applicationContext.xml    under WEB-INF folder and throw FileNotFoundException if it could not find this file. WebApplicationContext Apart from ApplicationContext, there can be multiple WebApplicationContext in a single web application. In simple words, each DispatcherServlet associated with single WebApplicationContext. xxx-servlet.xml file is specific to the DispatcherServlet and a web application can have more than one DispatcherServlet configured to handle the requests. In such scenrios, each DispatcherServlet would have a separate xxx-servlet.xml configured. But, applicationContext.xml will be common for all the servlet configuration files. Spring will by default load file named “xxx-servlet.xml” from your webapps WEB-INF folder where xxx is the servlet name in web.xml. If you want to change the name of that file name or change the location, add initi-param with contextConfigLocation as param name. Detail Explanation  Spring allows you to build multilevel application context hierarchies, so the required bean will be fetched from the parent context if it's not present in the current application context. In web apps as default there are two hierarchy levels, root and servlet contexts: This allows you to run some services as the singletons for the entire application (Spring Security beans and basic database access services typically reside here) and another as separated services in the corresponding servlets to avoid name clashes between beans. For example one servlet context will be serving the web pages and another will be implementing a stateless web service. This two level separation comes out of the box when you use the spring servlet classes: to configure the root application context you should use context-param tag in your web.xml <context-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value> /WEB-INF/root-context.xml /WEB-INF/applicationContext-security.xml </param-value> </context-param> (the root application context is created by ContextLoaderListener which is declared in web.xml <listener> <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class> </listener> ) and servlet tag for the servlet application contexts <servlet> <servlet-name>myservlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class> <init-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value>app-servlet.xml</param-value> </init-param> </servlet> Please note that if init-param will be omitted, then spring will use myservlet-servlet.xml in this example.