Two weeks ago, I wrote how you could write a Spring application with no annotations. Many alternatives are available to configure your Spring app. I’d like to list them in this post, leaving Spring Boot out of the picture on purpose. Core concepts Property file XML Groovy DSL Self-annotated classes Configuration classes Kotlin DSL Bean definitions Beans Conclusion Core concepts A couple of concepts are central in Spring.

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.