First of all, thanks to all who answered to my previous posting! I did not want one of this big "use another framework [Spring/AppFuse/Hibernate/...] in addition to Struts2" things. While this is surely the right way to go for a lot of heavy weight systems there are also smaller lightweight apps which need some initialization at startup time (and btw: these other frameworks themselves need a hook to the lifecycle events of the web app)
Finally I found the way to go: just use a ServletContextListener and put the configuration parameters you need in the deployment descriptor web.xml. The only "trick" needed: use <context-param> instead of <init-param>! One can access these context parameters the same way like servlet init parameters: use ... public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent lcEvent) { ServletContext context = lcEvent.getServletContext(); String par = context.getInitParameter("foo"); // this will access the context parameter "foo" from web.xml ... } Martin --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]