You can bootstrap a Spring context in a WAR using Spring's ContextLoaderListener class.

For example, the following web.xml file shows how to boot up a Spring application context that is initialized by the XML file, /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml (which is the location of the context file in the generated WAR package):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<web-app version="2.4" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">

    <display-name>Camel Routes</display-name>

    <!-- location of spring xml files -->
    <context-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <!-- the listener that kick-starts Spring -->
    <listener>
        <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
    </listener>

</web-app>