Difference between servlet and root context

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.

参考

Difference between applicationContext.xml and spring-servlet.xml in Spring Framework
What is the difference between ApplicationContext and WebApplicationContext in Spring MVC?
Spring Web Contexts