Among the different customers I worked for, I noticed a widespread misunderstanding regarding the use of Spring contexts in Spring MVC. Basically, you have contexts, in a parent-child relationship: The main context is where service beans are hosted. By convention, it is spawned from the /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml file but this location can be changed by using the contextConfigLocation context parameter. Alternatively, one can use the AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer an