Backend Apps in Spring

I was wondering what the best way is to deploy a backend app that uses Spring. I've made some web apps using Spring MVC, but I'm having some trouble seeing how to alter that configuration to support a backend app.

This app is going to be an emailer that runs continuously and receives JMS messages through Spring Integration, which it then processes to send out emails. Is the best thing to do to package this up as a war and run it in a servlet container? In that case, how does the application context file get loaded? Would I just use a web.xml as with a web app, and if so, what would the servlet class be? Thanks for your help!