Spring Security annotation configuration regarding web.xml - spring

Question

I'm using annotation based configuration and so far worked without a web.xml.
Now, according to documentation, I'll need to create a web.xml file and add these fields to it:
<filter>
<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
Can I configure this too with annotations?
Because If I make a web.xml and put only this, I'll get some other errors in runtime (like missing ContextLoaderListener etc etc..).

Answer 1

web.xml is part of the standard web-application packaging structure. This structure allows you to deploy your packaged war file on different servers such as Tomcat and Jetty.
You can read more about web.xml here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deployment_descriptor
You can read about the standard directory structure here (this is for Tomcat, but most web-servers follow the same/similar structure):
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/appdev/deployment.html#Standard_Directory_Layout
You should already have a web.xml if your application is a web-application. If not, then you should not create a web.xml but find another way of hooking in Spring Security. Please let us know how your application is currently deployed.
Here is an example of a web.xml for Spring with Spring Security:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE web-app
PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
"http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">
<web-app>
<!-- Spring Security Filter -->
<filter>
<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<listener>
<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>
<listener>
<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextListener</listener-class>
</listener>
<!-- The front controller of the Spring MVC Web application, responsible
for handling all application requests -->
<servlet>
<servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>
/WEB-INF/web-application-config.xml
</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<!-- Map requests to the DispatcherServlet for handling -->
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/app/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<welcome-file-list>
<welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

Answer 2

For a web app you need a web.xml.
Regarding your error missing ContextLoaderListener, just add this to the web.xml
<listener>
<listener-class>
org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
</listener-class>
</listener>