Spring Bean Factory vs ApplicationContext

• 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.