I have a class which use Spring to set certain properties. The properties are defined as interfaces and the concrete implementation of these is defined in references to beans in the aplicationContext.xml files(s). This is all standard Spring. However, IntelliJ has determined that this class is a web service (yes I'm using it as a service layer class, but no it's not a web service), and that the setters used by Spring have the following error... "Web Service Method Problem:Class com.fpi.bonddata.ValuationBuilder not public or does not allow instatiation" This must be a bug as there is nothing to specify that this class is a web service, and also it is standard practice in Spring to specify interfaces everywhere except in the context files.