As far as I know I can access the web.xml <context-param>s by making my class implement ServletContextListener and use the ServletContext.getInitParam(String) to read them, but it´s cumbersome as only one instance of the class will receive the contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent sce) call, so I need to make the ServletContext an static member of the class. What other ways exist of setting conf params at deployment time and what are the recommended ones?