After having some struggle with getting filters to integrate well with my Spring context, I decided to write down a small tutorial for it... To begin with, filters are defined in web.xml and are therefore not automatically part of the Spring application context, which is normally set up using the DispatcherServlet. A good way to abstract away all this is to use the DelegatingFilterProxy, which is a Spring utility class that acts as a filter, but will delegate the doFilter-method to a Spring-managed bean - normally a class extending GenericFilterBean. As a filter is defined in web.xml and looks for the bean defined in the Spring context in applicationContext.xml, it's not really the set up that I want. Filters are part of a web application and should have access to what's usually defined in webmvc-config.xml, as part of the DispatcherServlet set up. To be able to use, e.g. request scoped beans in applicationContext.xml, you need to defined them as proxied objects in order to hav...