Spring BeanFactory Container

This is the simplest container providing the basic support for DI and defined by the org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory interface. The BeanFactory and related interfaces, such as BeanFactoryAware, InitializingBean, DisposableBean, are still present in Spring for the purpose of backward compatibility with a large number of third-party frameworks that integrate with Spring. There are a number of implementations of the BeanFactory interface that are come straight out-of-the-box with Spring. The most commonly used BeanFactory implementation is the XmlBeanFactory class. This container reads the configuration metadata from an XML file and uses it to create a fully configured system or application. The BeanFactory is usually preferred where the resources are limited like mobile devices or applet-based applications. Thus, use an ApplicationContext unless you have a good reason for not doing so.