What is the difference between ApplicationContext and WebApplicationContext in Spring MVC?

ApplicationContext (Root Application Context) : Every Spring MVC web application has an applicationContext.xml file which is configured as the root of context configuration. Spring loads this file and creates an applicationContext for the entire application. This file is loaded by the ContextLoaderListener which is configured as a context param in web.xml file. And there will be only one applicationContext per web application.

WebApplicationContext : WebApplicationContext is a web aware application context i.e. it has servlet context information. A single web application can have multiple WebApplicationContext and each Dispatcher servlet (which is the front controller of Spring MVC architecture) is associated with a WebApplicationContext. The webApplicationContext configuration file *-servlet.xml is specific to a DispatcherServlet. And since a web application can have more than one dispatcher servlet configured to serve multiple requests, there can be more than one webApplicationContext file per web application.

Web application context, specified by the WebApplicationContext interface, is a Spring application context for a web applications. It has all the properties of a regular Spring application context, given that the WebApplicationContext interface extends the ApplicationContext interface, and add a method for retrieving the standard Servlet API ServletContext for the web application.

In addition to the standard Spring bean scopes singleton and prototype, there are three additional scopes available in a web application context:

• request - scopes a single bean definition to the lifecycle of a single HTTP request; that is, each HTTP request has its own instance of a bean created off the back of a single bean definition
• session - scopes a single bean definition to the lifecycle of an HTTP Session
• application - scopes a single bean definition to the lifecycle of a ServletContext