Howto get rid of ?

You can use BeanPostProcessor to customize each bean defined by <mvc:annotation-driven />. The javadocs now details all beans the tag registers.

If you really want to get rid of it, you can look at the source code of org.springframework.web.servlet.config.AnnotationDrivenBeanDefinitionParser

And you can see which beans it is defining. I’ve done this ‘exercise’ (not for all of them, but for those I need), so here are they:

<bean id="validator" class="org.springframework.validation.beanvalidation.LocalValidatorFactoryBean" />
<bean id="conversionService" class="org.springframework.format.support.FormattingConversionServiceFactoryBean" />

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter">
        <property name="webBindingInitializer">
            <bean class="com.yourpackage.web.util.CommonWebBindingInitializer" />
        </property>
        <property name="messageConverters">
            <list>
                <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.ByteArrayHttpMessageConverter" />
                <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.ResourceHttpMessageConverter" />
                <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.StringHttpMessageConverter" />
                <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.feed.AtomFeedHttpMessageConverter" />
                <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.feed.RssChannelHttpMessageConverter" />
                <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter" />
                <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.xml.SourceHttpMessageConverter" />
                <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.xml.XmlAwareFormHttpMessageConverter" />
                <!-- bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.xml.Jaxb2RootElementHttpMessageConverter" /-->
            </list>
        </property>
    </bean>
<bean id="handlerMapping"
    class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping">

Now, above you see the CommonWebBindingInitializer. You have to create this class, in order to use conversion and validation:

public class CommonWebBindingInitializer implements WebBindingInitializer {

    @Autowired
    private Validator validator;

    @Autowired
    private ConversionService conversionService;

    @Override
    public void initBinder(WebDataBinder binder, WebRequest request) {
        binder.setValidator(validator);
        binder.setConversionService(conversionService);
    }

}

And this works fine for me so far. Feel free to report any problems with it.