What s the difference between mvc annotation-driven and context annotation-config in servlet

Question

I am migrating from Spring 2 5 to Spring 3    They have introduced  lt mvc annotation-driven   gt  which does some black magic  This is expected to be declared in servlet configuration file only   In Spring 2 5 I have just used  lt context annotation-config   gt  and  lt context component-scan base        gt  tags declared both in application-context xml and dispatcher servlet configuration XML with appropriate base packages to scan   So I wonder what is the difference between mvc annotation-driven and context annotation-config tags in servlet config and what can I eliminate in Spring 3 config files

User · Answer

mvc annotation-driven is a tag added in Spring 3 0 which does the following     Configures the Spring 3 Type ConversionService  alternative to PropertyEditors   Adds support for formatting Number fields with  NumberFormat Adds support for formatting Date  Calendar  and Joda Time fields with  DateTimeFormat  if Joda Time is on the classpath  Adds support for validating  Controller inputs with  Valid  if a JSR-303 Provider is on the classpath  Adds support for support for reading and writing XML  if JAXB is on the classpath  HTTP message conversion with  RequestBody  ResponseBody   Adds support for reading and writing JSON  if Jackson is o n the classpath  along the same lines as  5     context annotation-config Looks for annotations on beans in the same application context it is defined and declares support for all the general annotations like  Autowired   Resource   Required   PostConstruct etc etc

User · Answer

lt context annotation-config gt  declares support for general annotations such as  Required   Autowired   PostConstruct  and so on    lt mvc annotation-driven   gt  declares explicit support for annotation-driven MVC controllers  i e   RequestMapping   Controller  although support for those is the default behaviour   as well as adding support for declarative validation via  Valid and message body marshalling with  RequestBody ResponseBody

User · Answer

There is also some more detail on the use of  lt mvc annotation-driven   gt  in the Spring docs  In a nutshell   lt mvc annotation-driven   gt  gives you greater control over the inner workings of Spring MVC  You don t need to use it unless you need one or more of the features outlined in the aforementioned section of the docs   Also  there are other  annotation-driven  tags available to provide additional functionality in other Spring modules  For example   lt transaction annotation-driven   gt  enables the use of the  Transaction annotation   lt task annotation-driven   gt  is required for  Scheduled et al

[spring] What's the difference between <mvc:annotation-driven /> and <context:annotation-config /> in servlet?

Examples related to spring

Examples related to spring-mvc

Examples related to spring-3