Final answer:
ApplicationContext and BeanFactory are both containers in Spring, with ApplicationContext being the more feature-complete enterprise-ready container that supports AOP, event propagation, and internationalization, while BeanFactory provides basic DI support and lazily initializes beans.
Step-by-step explanation:
The ApplicationContext and BeanFactory are both ways to obtain bean instances in the Spring Framework. However, they are not identical in their functionalities. The primary differences are as follows:
ApplicationContext includes all functionality of the BeanFactory and is generally recommended over BeanFactory for most applications, because it provides more enterprise-specific functionalities like event propagation, declarative mechanisms to create a bean and AOP features.
ApplicationContext provides internationalization support and easier integration with Spring's AOP features, while BeanFactory is a simpler container that provides basic support for DI and is defined by the org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory interface.
BeanFactory lazily initializes beans, only creating them as needed, whereas ApplicationContext eagerly initializes singleton beans at startup unless configured otherwise.
To sum up, ApplicationContext is a more complete feature-rich container, which is more suitable for enterprise-level applications due to its broader set of functionalities compared to BeanFactory.