title: Spring ContextLoader fails to find applicationContext.xml
body: <p>I've been working alone on a project for a long time and now another developer joined so I wanted to set up the project on his machine from SVN. We are both using very similar set-ups:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>OS X Snow Leopard</li>
  <li>Latest Eclipse WTP</li>
  <li>m2eclipse Maven Plugin</li>
  <li>Subversive SVN Plugin</li>
  <li>Tomcat 6.0.24</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>The Spring version used is 2.5.6. </p>
  
  <p>I set up the project on his machine using Eclipse's "Project from SVN" tool, essentially creating a 1:1 copy of the project. Maven took care of all dependencies without problems as far as I can tell, the project compiled without problems. The project structure is following the Maven standard for webapps with resources (like the applicationContext.xml) in src/main/resources, the project's code in src/main/java and all web-app related files in src/main/webapp and src/main/webapp/WEB-INF respectively.</p>
  
  <p>The web.xml is configured to load the context like so:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;context-param&gt;
      &lt;param-name&gt;contextConfigLocation&lt;/param-name&gt;
      &lt;param-value&gt;classpath:applicationContext.xml&lt;/param-value&gt;
  &lt;/context-param&gt;
  
  &lt;listener&gt;
      &lt;listener-class&gt;org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener&lt;/listener-class&gt;
  &lt;/listener&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Using the "Servers" tool of Eclipse I tried launching the application right from Eclipse, but it failed immediately with a FileNotFoundException when trying to load the applicationContext.xml.</p>
  
  <p>Since the code checked out from SVN has been left untouched I guess the problem has to do with some parameter for the Maven plugin. Or that I forgot some important step to finalize the set-up. Has anybody encountered a similar issue or has an idea where I should start looking?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you very much for you help!</p>