Spring Bean Factory

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The root interface for accessing a Spring bean container.
Spring bean factory is responsible for managing the life cycle of beans created through spring containers.
Depending on the bean definition, the factory will return either an independent instance of a contained object (the Prototype design pattern), or a single shared instance (a superior alternative to the Singleton design pattern, in which the instance is a singleton in the scope of the factory). Which type of instance will be returned depends on the bean factory configuration: the API is the same.
The point of this approach is that the BeanFactory is a central registry of application components, and centralizes configuration of application components (no more do individual objects need to read properties files, for example).
Note that it is generally better to rely on Dependency Injection (“push” configuration) to configure application objects through setters or constructors, rather than use any form of “pull” configuration like a BeanFactory lookup. Spring’s Dependency Injection functionality is implemented using this BeanFactory interface and its subinterfaces.

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