Application context

[Nawab Choudhary]

I recently came across a question that when is the context file of spring loaded?

I replied that for a standalone application it would load whenever the main method is called.
And for a web application it would be loaded on startup.

Could anyone please provide me with the correct answer with explanation if these are wrong?

[Saifuddin Merchant]

For a standalone application (and web too really) the context is loaded whenever the applicationContext object is created in the program,

ApplicationContext app = new ClassPathXMLApplicationContext()...

For a web application this is normally taken care by the DispatcherServlet or the ContextLoaderListener. Which is why you normally don't need to instantiate the applicationContext manually for web apps!