Spring Bean Factory

Spring provides two kinds of IOC container, one is XMLBeanFactory and other is ApplicationContext.

+---------------------------------------+-----------------+--------------------------------+
|                                       | XMLBeanFactory  |       ApplicationContext       |
+---------------------------------------+-----------------+--------------------------------+
| Annotation support                    | No              | Yes                            |
| BeanPostProcessor Registration        | Manual          | Automatic                      |
| implimentation                        | XMLBeanFactory  | ClassPath/FileSystem/WebXmlApplicationContext|
| internationalization                  | No              | Yes                            |
| Enterprise services                   | No              | Yes                            |
| ApplicationEvent publication          | No              | Yes                            |
+---------------------------------------+-----------------+--------------------------------+

1. FileSystemXmlApplicationContext: Beans loaded through the full path.
2. ClassPathXmlApplicationContext: Beans loaded through the CLASSPATH
3. WebXmlApplicationContext: Beans loaded through the web application context.