I've been stuck on this issue for a while now and feel that I am completely lost, even after posting on other forums and searching. I want to instantiate a Spring-managed bean so am first trying to create a new instance of ApplicationContext and am trying to do so, like below:

Code:
ApplicationContext applicationContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext ( "applicationContext.xml" );
But When this line of code is called in the application I get an error:

Code:
java.io.FileNotFoundException: class path resource [WEB-INF/spring.properties] cannot be opened because it does not exist
I have made sure that spring.properties is in my .classpath file in the root of my application and have also tried having it in /WEB-INF/classes as well as just /WEB-INF. Also, I have tried putting the code below into my applicationContext.xml file and have tried various variations on it, as advised elsewhere, but nothing solves the issue:

Code:
<bean id="propertyConfigurer" 
  class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
    <property name="location" value="spring.properties" />
</bean>
I would greatly appreciate if anyone can be patient with my lack of understanding on this issue and point me in the right direction. Thanks