Prefix “context” for element “context:component-scan” or "context:annotation-config" is not bound : Spring error

When you are working on spring or spring mvc application, you may encounter below error message.
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The prefix “context” for element “context:component-scan” is not bound .
or
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The prefix “context” for element “context:annotation-config” is not bound .

This issue generally occurs when you do not include context namespace.

For example: Lets say you have below xml configuration file.

<beans xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"

xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"

xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans

http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd

http://www.springframework.org/schema/context

http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd" >

<context:annotation-config />

<context:component-scan base-package="controller" />

</beans>

Here you might get above exception because you are missing context namespace xmlns:context here.
When you add below line in above xml.

xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"

so your final xml file will look as below: