title: applicationContextProvider is not being called
body: <p>I am using Spring 3.0.3.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to use the applicationContextProvider so I declared:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
  &lt;beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop"
       xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context" 
       xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
       xsi:schemaLocation="
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans 
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.0.xsd 
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd 
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop 
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-3.0.xsd"&gt;
      &lt;bean id="applicationContextProvider" class="com.mycompany.util.ApplicationContextProvider"&gt;&lt;/bean&gt;
      &lt;context:annotation-config/&gt;
      &lt;tx:annotation-driven/&gt;
  &lt;/beans&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and my ApplicationContextProvider:</p>
  
  <pre><code>public class ApplicationContextProvider implements ApplicationContextAware {
  
      private static ApplicationContext applicationContext = null;
  
      public static ApplicationContext getApplicationContext() {
          return applicationContext;
      }
      public void setApplicationContext(ApplicationContext _applicationContext) throws BeansException {
          applicationContext = _applicationContext;
  
      }
  
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But the set is never being called!</p>
  
  <p>and whenever I am using <code>ApplicationContextProvider.getApplicationContext()</code> returns null.</p>
  
  <p>why is it?</p>