Spring MVC equivalent of Struts plug-in concept equivalent, understand, background, completely

amy

I'm in the process of trying to decide how to completely Springify my Struts web-app and one of the things my web application does is use the Struts plug-in concept to start up a background thread when the servlet is initialized.  

I'm still fairly new to Spring and I think I understand the concepts behind it but I can't seem to figure out how to convert this particular aspect of my Struts app.

What's the equivalent in Spring?

Thanks,
Justin