BeanFactory in Spring

As its name implies, a bean factory is an implementation of the Factory design pattern. That is, it is a class whose responsibility is to create and dispense beans. The BeanFactory is the actual container which instantiates, configures, and manages a number of beans. These beans typically collaborate with one another, and thus have dependencies between themselves. When a bean factory hands out objects, those objects are fully configured, are aware of their collaborating objects, and are ready to use.

BeanFactory is a workhorse that initializes beans and calls their lifecycle methods. It should be noted that most lifecycle methods only apply to singleton beans. Spring cannot manage prototype (non-singleton) lifecycles. This is because, after they’re created, prototypes are handed off to the client and the container loses track of it. For prototypes, Spring is really just a replacement for the “new” operator.

A BeanFactory is represented by the interface org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory, and it is having multiple implementations. The most commonly used simple BeanFactory implementation is org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanFactory. (This should be qualified with the reminder that ApplicationContexts are a subclass of BeanFactory, and most users end up using XML variants of ApplicationContext).

Although for most scenarios, almost all user code managed by the BeanFactory does not have to be aware of the BeanFactory, the BeanFactory does have to be instantiated somehow. This can happen via explicit user code such as:

Resource res = new FileSystemResource("beans.xml");
XmlBeanFactory factory = new XmlBeanFactory(res);

or

ClassPathResource res = new ClassPathResource("beans.xml");
XmlBeanFactory factory = new XmlBeanFactory(res);

or

ClassPathXmlApplicationContext appContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(
        new String[] {"applicationContext.xml", "applicationContext-part2.xml"});
// of course, an ApplicationContext is just a BeanFactory
BeanFactory factory = (BeanFactory) appContext;

Beans are lazily loaded into bean factories, meaning that while the bean factory will immediately load the bean definitions (the description of beans and their properties), the beans themselves will not be instantiated until they are needed. While in case of ApplicationContext Interface beans are pre-loaded. See the posts - ApplicationContext in spring and Lazy and pre-loading of beans in spring. os.