The order of elements does not matter in Servlets 2.4, so you don't have to worry about that. (the order in which listeners and filters is important though)
About Filters : The order in which filters are invoked is the order in which filter-mapping declarations that match a request URI for a servlet appear in the list of filter-mapping elements.
About listeners : The Web container registers the listener instances according to the interfaces they implement and the order in which they appear in the deployment descriptor. On application shutdown, listeners are notified in reverse order to their declarations with notifications to session listeners preceeding notifications to context listeners.