Question

I am developing a simple web application using Spring framework 3.1.3.RELEASE & MAVEN. My application would not startup unless I take out the listener from web.xml

<listener>
   <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

Tomcat reports the following error:

INFO: Deploying web application archive sampleapp.war
11/12/2012 3:45:03 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext start
SEVERE: Error listenerStart
11/12/2012 3:45:03 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext start
SEVERE: Context [/sampleapp] startup failed due to previous errors

My WEB.XML looks as follows:

<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
    version="3.0">
    <display-name>EMS</display-name>

    <listener>
        <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
        </listener-class>
    </listener>

    <context-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>/WEB-INF/spring/*-context.xml</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <welcome-file-list>
        <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
    </welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

Application Context File is empty at this point:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans 
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-2.5.xsd">





</beans>

Below is the JAR files under WEB-INF/lib

eclipselink-2.4.0.jar             
javax.persistence-2.0.0.jar       
mysql-connector-java-5.1.21.jar   
spring-context-3.1.3.RELEASE.jar
spring-core-3.1.3.RELEASE.jar
spring-web-3.1.3.RELEASE.jar
spring-webmvc-3.1.3.RELEASE.jar

Below is the files under WEB-INF

application.properties  
spring-context.xml  
web.xml

I understand that:

• ContextLoaderListener is available in spring-web-3.1.3.RELEASE.jar
• If the JAR is available in WEB-INF/lib then it should be picked
  by TOMCAT.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The problem was missing Spring Dependencies in my POM file. I initially had the following dependencies in the POM

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
        </dependency>

I enabled debugging on tomcat logging.properties to see that I was getting a class ava.lang.NoClassDefFoundError as I added dependencies (one at a time) the ava.lang.NoClassDefFoundError kept changing until all dependencies were satisfied. The ContextLoaderListener started up OK after that. The dependencies I added are:

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-beans</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-asm</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-expression</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <!-- required by Spring -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
            <artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
            <version>1.1.1</version>
        </dependency>

I