[Springframework-developer] I don't think the way XmlWebApplicationContext finds context is at all portable

[Colin S. <col...@ex...>]

Currently XmlWebApplicationContext builds up a defualt path for the 
application context as
  /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml

then, in AbstractApplicationContext, this is attempted to be loaded via 
a regular getResourceAsStream call, which fails (as you'd expect it to), 
then does successfully get loaded via the
   new FileInputStream(path)
call in getResourceByPath().

However, if you look in the Servlet spec, nowhere does it say that the 
base directory for file operations has to be set to the base directory 
of the webapp. This certainly does work in JBoss and TomCat, the two 
environments where I've tried Spring, but I think the much better 
behaviour would be to rely on the
  getResourceAsStream()
method in ServletContext, which according to the spec _is_ guaranteed to 
include the web-app base in the classpath searched by that call.

One way to handle this would be to implement/override 
getResourceAsStream in XmlWebApplicationContext, instead of relying on 
the one in the abstract base class.

Regards,

Colin