My Spring application could not load the Servlet Context

Question

I am working on the Spring4.1.6 release. I have deployed my Webapplication named SpringMVCTest on Tomcat 7.0. I am getting the below exception on the Tomcat startup. Below are the Spring configuration file details.

web.xml

<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee 
          http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
    version="3.0">
    <display-name>SpringMVC Test Web Application</display-name>
    <listener>
        <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
    </listener>

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
            <param-value>/WEB-INF/config/spring/webmvc-config.xml</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>Spring MVC Dispatcher Servlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

I have already added the contextConfigLocation parameter inside the web.xml and also below is the contents of the webmvc-config.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans default-autowire="byName"
    xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" 
    xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:jdbc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util" xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
    xmlns:jee="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee"
    xsi:schemaLocation="
         http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc/spring-jdbc.xsd 
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util-3.0.xsd 
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.0.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee/spring-jee-3.0.xsd">

    <!-- DispatcherServlet Context: defines this servlet's request-processing infrastructure -->

    <!-- Scans within the base package of the application for @Components to configure as beans -->
    <!-- @Controller, @Service, @Configuration, etc. -->
    <context:component-scan base-package="com.springmvc" />
    <!-- Enables the Spring MVC @Controller programming model -->
    <mvc:annotation-driven />

    <bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
        <property name="prefix">
            <value>/WEB-INF/</value>
        </property>
        <property name="suffix">
            <value>.jsp</value>
        </property>
    </bean>
    
</beans>

Bean class

/**
 * 
 */
package com.springmvc.bean.Person;

import java.util.List;

/**
 * @author jp48346
 *
 */
public class Person {

    private String name;
    private String email;
    private String gender;
    private String password;
    private String passwordConf;
    private List<String> courses;
    private String tutor;
    private String hiddenMessage;
    
    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }
    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }
    public String getEmail() {
        return email;
    }
    public void setEmail(String email) {
        this.email = email;
    }
    public String getGender() {
        return gender;
    }
    public void setGender(String gender) {
        this.gender = gender;
    }
    public String getPassword() {
        return password;
    }
    public void setPassword(String password) {
        this.password = password;
    }
    public String getPasswordConf() {
        return passwordConf;
    }
    public void setPasswordConf(String passwordConf) {
        this.passwordConf = passwordConf;
    }
    public List<String> getCourses() {
        return courses;
    }
    public void setCourses(List<String> courses) {
        this.courses = courses;
    }
    public String getTutor() {
        return tutor;
    }
    public void setTutor(String tutor) {
        this.tutor = tutor;
    }
    public String getHiddenMessage() {
        return hiddenMessage;
    }
    public void setHiddenMessage(String hiddenMessage) {
        this.hiddenMessage = hiddenMessage;
    }
    
}

PersonRegistration.jsp

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
    pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>
<%@ taglib prefix="form" uri="http://www.springframework.org/tags/form"%>
   
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>test Spring MVC Sample</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Fill your form!</h2>
 <form:form method="POST" commandName="form">
     <table>
            <tr>
                <td>Enter your name:</td>
                <td><form:input path="name" /></td>
                <td><form:errors path="name" cssStyle="color: #ff0000;"/></td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td><input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit"></td>
            </tr>
    </table>
</form:form>        

</body>
</html>

But I don't understand one thing why I am still getting the below exception? As per the logs why it is still trying to look for the applicationContext.xml in the WEB-INF directory?

INFO: Loading XML bean definitions from ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml] May 19, 2015 6:36:01 PM org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader initWebApplicationContext SEVERE: Context initialization failed org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanDefinitionStoreException: IOException parsing XML document from ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml]; nested exception is java.io.FileNotFoundException: Could not open ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml] at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader.loadBeanDefinitions(XmlBeanDefinitionReader.java:344) at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader.loadBeanDefinitions(XmlBeanDefinitionReader.java:304) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanDefinitionReader.loadBeanDefinitions(AbstractBeanDefinitionReader.java:181) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanDefinitionReader.loadBeanDefinitions(AbstractBeanDefinitionReader.java:217) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanDefinitionReader.loadBeanDefinitions(AbstractBeanDefinitionReader.java:188) at org.springframework.web.context.support.XmlWebApplicationContext.loadBeanDefinitions(XmlWebApplicationContext.java:125) at org.springframework.web.context.support.XmlWebApplicationContext.loadBeanDefinitions(XmlWebApplicationContext.java:94) at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractRefreshableApplicationContext.refreshBeanFactory(AbstractRefreshableApplicationContext.java:129) at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.obtainFreshBeanFactory(AbstractApplicationContext.java:537) at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:452) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.configureAndRefreshWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:403) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.initWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:306) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener.contextInitialized(ContextLoaderListener.java:106) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.listenerStart(StandardContext.java:5016) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5528) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$StartChild.call(ContainerBase.java:1575) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase$StartChild.call(ContainerBase.java:1565) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:262) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1145) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:615) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745) Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: Could not open ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml] at org.springframework.web.context.support.ServletContextResource.getInputStream(ServletContextResource.java:141) at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader.loadBeanDefinitions(XmlBeanDefinitionReader.java:330) ... 21 more