On the surface, an application context is similar as a bean factory. But application context offers much more..

? Application contexts give a means for resolving text messages, including support for i18n of those messages.

? Application contexts give a generic way to load file resources, like 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.

? ResourceLoader support: Spring's Resource interface us a flexible generic abstraction for handling low-level resources. An application context itself is a ResourceLoader, As provides an application with access to deployment-particular Resource instances.

? MessageSource support: The application context executes MessageSource, an interface used to obtain localized messages, with the actual execution being pluggable