The current web support in spring dm embeds the web container as an osgi bundle. This means you always need to run the OSGi runtime as base infrastrukture and then running tomcat, forr example, inside this OSGi runtime. Having this as the preferred environment is perfectly fine. Nevertheless there are some environments out there where the web container cannot be easily embedded into an OSGi runtime (maybe for technical reasons, maybe for organisational ones). For those settings spring-dm needs to support a deployment model for the web support where the web container is outside of the OSGi runtime (the equinox servlet bridge workaround is one example for this).