Got JavaConfig to work properly. Had to suppress tests and I'm in the process of upgrading them to javaconfig as well. Few notes: Upgrade to Spring 4.0, Unable to get services, dao to be made available in the root context. Spring has a bug with picking up the @configuration decorated classes in the root context. I had to move them to be picked up in the servlet context. Removed all primary spring xml files including the persistence.xml file.