Spring WebApplicationInitializer and ApplicationContextInitializer confusion



These are two concepts that I mix up occasionally - a WebApplicationInitializer and an ApplicationContextInitializer, and wanted to describe each of them to clarify them for myself. 

I have previously blogged about WebApplicationInitializerhere and here. It is relevant purely in a Servlet 3.0+ spec compliant servlet container and provides a hook to programmatically configure the servlet context. How does this help - you can have a web application without potentially any web.xml file, typically used in a Spring based web application to describe the root application context and the Spring web front controller called theDispatcherServlet. An example of using WebApplicationInitializer is the following:

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01. public class CustomWebAppInitializer extends AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer {

02.  @Override

03.  protected Class<?>[] getRootConfigClasses() {

04.   return new Class<?>[]{RootConfiguration.class};

05.  }

06.  

07.  @Override

08.  protected Class<?>[] getServletConfigClasses() {

09.   return new Class<?>[]{MvcConfiguration.class};

10.  }

11.  

12.  @Override

13.  protected String[] getServletMappings() {

14.   return new String[]{"/"};

15.  }

16. }

Now, what is an ApplicationContextInitializer. It is essentially code that gets executed before the Spring application context gets completely created. A good use case for using an ApplicationContextInitializer would be to set a Spring environment profile programmatically, along these lines:

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01. public class DemoApplicationContextInitializer implements ApplicationContextInitializer<ConfigurableApplicationContext> {

02.  

03.  @Override

04.  public void initialize(ConfigurableApplicationContext ac) {

05.   ConfigurableEnvironment appEnvironment = ac.getEnvironment();

06.   appEnvironment.addActiveProfile("demo");

07.  

08.  }

09. }

If you have a Spring-Boot based application then registering an ApplicationContextInitializer is fairly straightforward:

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01. @Configuration

02. @EnableAutoConfiguration

03. @ComponentScan

04. public class SampleWebApplication {

05.   

06.  public static void main(String[] args) {

07.   new SpringApplicationBuilder(SampleWebApplication.class)

08.     .initializers(new DemoApplicationContextInitializer())

09.     .run(args);

10.  }

11. }

For a non Spring-Boot Spring application though, it is a little more tricky, if it is a programmatic configuration of web.xml, then the configuration is along these lines:

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01. public class CustomWebAppInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {

02.  

03.  @Override

04.  public void onStartup(ServletContext container) {

05.   AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext rootContext = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();

06.   rootContext.register(RootConfiguration.class);

07.   ContextLoaderListener contextLoaderListener = new ContextLoaderListener(rootContext);

08.   container.addListener(contextLoaderListener);

09.   container.setInitParameter("contextInitializerClasses", "mvctest.web.DemoApplicationContextInitializer");

10.   AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext webContext = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();

11.   webContext.register(MvcConfiguration.class);

12.   DispatcherServlet dispatcherServlet = new DispatcherServlet(webContext);

13.   ServletRegistration.Dynamic dispatcher = container.addServlet("dispatcher", dispatcherServlet);

14.   dispatcher.addMapping("/");

15.  }

16. }

If it a normal web.xml configuration then the initializer can be specified this way:

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1. <context-param>

2. <param-name>contextInitializerClasses</param-name>

3. <param-value>com.myapp.spring.SpringContextProfileInit</param-value>

4. </context-param>

5.  

6. <listener>

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

8. </listener>

So to conclude, except for the Initializer suffix, both WebApplicationInitializer and ApplicationContextInitializer serve fairly different purposes. Whereas the WebApplicationInitializer is used by a Servlet Container at startup of the web application and provides a way for programmatic creating a web application(replacement for a web.xml file), ApplicationContextInitializer provides a hook to configure the Spring application context before it gets fully created.