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For a Maven application you'll need to a add dependency to the struts2-spring-plugin jar (see the Maven example application for this tutorial). For a an Ant built application you'll need to add the struts2-spring-plugin jar and the Spring jars to your application's class path (see the Ant example application for this tutorial).

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To make our application "Spring aware" we need to add this line to web.xml.

<listener>
	<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

The above code will activate the Spring framework when the application is started up by the Servlet container. By default Spring will look for a configuration file name applicationContext.xml in WEB-INF (consult the Spring documentation for how you can change where Spring looks and what the configuration file name is).

Spring Configuration File

In the Spring configuration file we create a bean node for those objects we want Spring to create an instance of and inject into our ActionSupport class. In the example application is this applicationContext.xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd">

<bean id="editService" class="org.apache.struts.edit.service.EditServiceInMemory" />

</beans>

Note the id value above. By default the Spring plugin works with Spring to autowire the dependencies of the ActionClass by "name." Spring will create an object of class EditServiceMemory and provide that object to any ActionSupport class that has a setEditService method with an argument of type EditService. Consult the Spring Plugin documentation for how to change the default autowire method.