I have found this feature to be not reliable. I managed to get it working in projects that were very small and simple. But in projects that were in depth, containing one or more Spring application context files, with several bean nodes defined, it flat out did not work. I kept getting the 404 error. I have proven this out after hours of trying to figure out why it would not work on these larger apps by creating a bare bones Spring / Maven application. No controllers, no application context xml files, nothing except for the required Spring core dependencies in the POM file and a weblogic.xml file containing only that virtual-directory-mapping tag. It worked just fine in this bare bones project. Until somebody can explain to me why this works on simple applications while it fails on more in-depth apps, I would have to say to developers "beware".
Can you please share your sample project with us so that we can have a look on it to find out why it is not working with your Spring Project. Also please let us know what is your Spring & WLS Version?
I have found this feature to be not reliable. I managed to get it working in projects that were very small and simple. But in projects that were in depth, containing one or more Spring application context files, with several bean nodes defined, it flat out did not work. I kept getting the 404 error. I have proven this out after hours of trying to figure out why it would not work on these larger apps by creating a bare bones Spring / Maven application. No controllers, no application context xml files, nothing except for the required Spring core dependencies in the POM file and a weblogic.xml file containing only that virtual-directory-mapping tag. It worked just fine in this bare bones project. Until somebody can explain to me why this works on simple applications while it fails on more in-depth apps, I would have to say to developers "beware".