Loading spring context in web application after some servlet

Question

Hi all,

We need to load the spring application context in our web application after one of our servlets is initialized, so I wonder what is the best way to do it?

I know that it's recommended to use the listener in web.xml, but it's obviously not good for us because in this case the context will be loaded before the first servlet. I saw that there was this class - ContextLoaderServet - in Spring 2.5, but it's absent in Spring 3.0. So I guess we should write some dummy servlet ourselves with the sole purpose of loading the context? Is there any better way?

Thanks.