Jetty7, Spring, Testing and Classloading

Currently working in a project where Jetty is configured in a Spring Context, that is started for unit tests. I was permanently hitting: "Context attribute is not of type WebApplicationContext". However, in the debugger I could see it was given a XmlWebApplicationContext - WTF? I figured it must be some classloading issue. Maybe something that was different when comparing Jetty 6 and 7? In previous Spring projects I have always used Jetty 6. This was the first time I tried Jetty 7 - which is still not final I think.

Anyway, what you want to do is this in your Spring applicationContext.xml file:

Previously I never had to use the parentLoaderPriority property but this made my tests working.

One (unrelated) question mark remains though. This is a Maven based project and the deploy artifact is a WAR file. There was one unit test that manually started a Jetty server in-process to do some testing. My initial idea was to use the maven-jetty-plugin to start Jetty before the test suite runs using the Maven command-line. However in that case it would not have been possible to run this test isolated in the IDE. I decided to make the test a Spring powered unit test and have the Spring Context start up Jetty. Unfortunately this required an existing WAR file, correctly set in the war property of the WebAppContext (see above). Maven builds the WAR file after running the test. To work around this, I told Maven to construct the WAR file before the tests are run:

    
        
            
                org.apache.maven.plugins
                maven-war-plugin
                
                    
                        war-it
                        generate-test-resources
                        
                            war
                        
                    
                
            
        
    

Anyone else has solved this scenario differently?