What is the difference between Bean Factory and ApplicationContext?

Following are some of the differences: Application contexts provide a means for resolving text messages, including support for i18n of those messages. Application contexts provide a generic way to load file resources, such as images. Application contexts can publish events to beans that are registered as listeners. Certain operations on the container or beans in the container, which have to be handled in a programmatic fashion with a bean factory, can be handled declaratively in an application context. The application context implements MessageSource, an interface used to obtain localized messages, with the actual implementation being pluggable.