Difference between DispatcherServlet and ContextLoaderListener

To sum up:

  There are two types of Spring WebApplicationContext loading: ContextLoaderListener and DispatcherServlet. In web.xml configuration, what is the difference between ContextLoaderListener and DispatcherServlet?

1 ContextLoaderListener
  is started when our web container starts, and the applicationContext.xml file under /WEB-INF/ will be loaded by default. And create a WebApplicationContext container, which is the Root WebApplicationContext of the web.

2 DispatcherServlet
  is created when we first visit our application. At this time, it will configure the <servlet-name>-servlet.xml configuration file under /WEB-INF by default, and then also create a WebApplicationContext. This WebApplicationContext has the container created by the ContextLoaderListener as the parent container. Therefore, all beans configured in the parent container can be injected into the child container; beans in the child container cannot be referenced and used by the parent container.

You can refer to another article:

http://angie.iteye.com/blog/2334956