- A more powerful and flexible dependency injection framework which allows access to services in more places in the application
- to implement Spring Security to make it easier to apply security to different page views
Most of what you see in those xml files is just wiring classes together and so it's not expected that anyone would ever change them. This is why there isn't any documentation on all but one of them. However, Spring is a very popular framework for Java developers so if someone wanted to customise the application and take advantage of Spring, the decision was made to have them available in the file system rather than buried away in a jar.
The one exception is the
applicationContext-security.xml file which is where you can apply security by URL to your views. Some documentation on how to do that is available here
Regarding new-alerts looking at test-alerts/dataplan1, that's just some sample configuration in the distribution. It can be changed with your existing 1.6 configuration
here.
Thanks,
Andrew