Question

As the title says what is the difference between dispatcher-servlet.xml and spring-servlet.xml They seem very similar in terms of structure. When should one be used over the other ?

Answer 1

Here’s an explanation from spring forums

Basically it’s just the name. Dispather is autoloading context called [servletname]-servlet.xml so in this case there’s a servlet called ‘spring’ and another called ‘dispatcher’.

You name your servlets in web.xml.

For example if you had:

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>babubiba</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class> org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet </servlet-class>
     <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

in your web.xml then DispatcherServlet would try to load babubiba-servlet.xml by default.

If you can change context name by adding contextConfigLocation init-param to your servlet config.