Spring DispatcherServlet context instantiation error in liferay 6.1.1 - spring

Question

I'm in the process of migrating the liferay version of my webapp from 6.1.0 to 6.1.1 (using the 6.1.1-ga2 version from liferay patchers community and have a little problem with my webservices that where previously working.
I use the PortalDelegateServlet to instantiate a spring DispatcherServlet.
The problem I have is that the spring context of my servlet (myWS-servlet.xml) is instantiate before the application context of the PortletContextLoaderListener ( also tried with the ContextLoaderListener from spring, same problem )
and, as my controllers use services from the principal application context (which is not loaded at the time the DispatcherServlet is instantiated), spring cannot autowired them.
Strange thing is that the problem is resolved if I redeploy my portlet.
Do you have any idea how I can fix this ?
my web.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" id="WebApp_ID" version="2.5">
<display-name>banner-portlet</display-name>
<jsp-config>
<taglib>
<taglib-uri>http://java.sun.com/portlet_2_0</taglib-uri>
<taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/liferay-portlet.tld</taglib-location>
</taglib>
<taglib>
<taglib-uri>http://liferay.com/tld/theme</taglib-uri>
<taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/liferay-theme.tld</taglib-location>
</taglib>
<taglib>
<taglib-uri>http://liferay.com/tld/portlet</taglib-uri>
<taglib-location>/WEB-INF/tlds/liferay-portlet-ext.tld</taglib-location>
</taglib>
</jsp-config>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>liferayWSdispatcher</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>com.liferay.portal.kernel.servlet.PortalDelegateServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>servlet-class</param-name>
<param-value>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
<param-name>sub-context</param-name>
<param-value>rest-api</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>liferayWSdispatcher</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<listener>
<listener-class>com.liferay.portal.spring.context.PortletContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>
<context-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>classpath*:applicationContext.xml</param-value>
</context-param>
<context-param>
<param-name>javax.faces.PROJECT_STAGE</param-name>
<param-value>Development</param-value>
</context-param>
<context-param>
<param-name>javax.faces.FACELETS_SKIP_COMMENTS</param-name>
<param-value>true</param-value>
</context-param>
<!-- Instruct Mojarra to utilize JBoss-EL instead of the EL implementation
provided by the servlet container. -->
<!-- was used only for admin portlets but make calendar portlet crash
<context-param>
<param-name>com.sun.faces.expressionFactory</param-name>
<param-value>org.jboss.el.ExpressionFactoryImpl</param-value>
</context-param>
-->
<servlet>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<filter>
<filter-name>PrimeFaces FileUpload Filter</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.primefaces.webapp.filter.FileUploadFilter</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>PrimeFaces FileUpload Filter</filter-name>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
</filter-mapping>
<listener>
<listener-class>com.liferay.faces.portal.listener.StartupListener</listener-class>
</listener>
<!-- MyFaces will not initialize unless a servlet-mapping to the Faces Servlet
is present. -->
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.xhtml</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<context-param>
<param-name>portalContextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>/WEB-INF/applicationContext-velocity-tool.xml</param-value>
</context-param>
my applicationContext.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd">
<context:component-scan base-package="be.maximede">
<context:exclude-filter type="regex" expression="be.maximede.webservice.*"/>
</context:component-scan>
my myWS-servlet.xml
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd">
<context:component-scan base-package="be.maximede.webservice"/>
<mvc:annotation-driven />

Answer 1

I know this thread is over a year old. But I wanted to help save people some trouble. My coworkers and I spent a week trying to figure this out why we can't load spring services before portlet controllers using spring and PortalDelegateServlet + DispatcherServlet.
It's somewhat but not directly related to the Issue http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-29103 as the other poster commented. It does have to do with the way Servlets were initialized in liferay and how Liferay handles web.xml rewrite.
Liferay rewrites all your listeners defined within web.xml and puts them into a context param likes this:
<context-param>
<param-name>portalListenerClasses</param-name>
<param-value>com.liferay.portal.kernel.servlet.SerializableSessionAttributeListener,org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</param-value>
</context-param>
and then creates its own listener (or not shown, a PluginContextListener):
<listener>
<listener-class>com.liferay.portal.kernel.servlet.SecurePluginContextListener</listener-class>
</listener>
This SecurePluginContextListener then loads up the context and wires things up. The problem is that sometimes, SecurePluginContextListener will initialize PortalDelegateServlet with the Web Application Context first and then it moves on to the init methods within the portalListenerClasses. So any AutoWired stuff within the portlet controller is missing all their dependencies (services from the application context).
In order to get around this, we ditched declaring PortalDelegateServlet within the web.xml and created a custom ServletContextListener that would new up a PortalDelagateServlet and ServletConfig, passing in the same parameters to spring's DispatcherServlet. The reason why this works is because, we let Liferay do all the loading within portalListenerClasses. The rewritten web.xml would look like this:
<context-param>
<param-name>portalListenerClasses</param-name>
<param-value>com.liferay.portal.kernel.servlet.SerializableSessionAttributeListener,org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener, com.domain.CustomContextListener</param-value>
</context-param>
And CustomContextListener would implement the methods in ServletContextListener.
Within CustomContextListener's contextInitialized(...) method, we just programmatically create the same ServletConfig (An inner class that implements ServletConfig) we had inside the web.xml. We then create a pds = new PortalDelegateServlet() and call pds.init(customServletConfig)

Answer 2

For Liferay 6.1.1 this is a known issue:
http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-29103