Difference Between Application Context and Bean Factory in Spring

Even though both are responsible for bean instantiation and wiring but there are some differences between them.

Bean Factory	Application Context
Instantiate a bean when ever required. i.e Lazy Instantiation	Pre instantiate all the beans at the time of container creation
Doesn't support annotation based dependency injection	Supports annotation based injection
Doesn't publish events to listeners	Application contexts can publish events to beans that are registered as listeners
Doesn't provide support for internationalization i.e i18n	supports internationalization
Provides Basic IOC and DI (Dependency Injection) features	Application Context provides advanced features such as JNDI access, EJB integration, remoting, along with IOC and DI