Solved: Unable to Locate Spring Namespace Handler

I attempted to run a Spring WebMVC application, and when starting up the application complained that it didn't know how to handle the MVC namespace in my XML configuration. The project runs JDK 7 and Spring 4.0.6 using Maven as the build system.

The following is my XML configuration file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"       xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"       xsi:schemaLocation="        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd        http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc        http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc.xsd">
    
    <mvc:annotation-driven/>
    
</beans>

I have a few more beans than this, but their details aren't especially relevant to this treatment. The application startup failed with a message indicating that Spring does not know how to process the MVC namespace specified in the XML configuration file:

org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException: Configuration problem: Unable to locate Spring NamespaceHandler for XML schema namespace [http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc]

After a good bit of searching, I found the answer on StackOverflow. I am using Maven Shade plugin to make a bundled jar file, but the bundle omitted some files in META-INF necessary for Spring to resolve the MVC namespace. The solution was to add some additional transformations into the Shade configuration:

<transformer implementation="org.apache.maven.plugins.shade.resource.AppendingTransformer">   <resource>META-INF/spring.handlers</resource></transformer><transformer implementation="org.apache.maven.plugins.shade.resource.AppendingTransformer">   <resource>META-INF/spring.schemas</resource></transformer>

Here is the full discussion on StackOverflow. It was frustrating that it was so hard to find this solution online - so hopefully this post saves somebody else some effort.