applicationcontext

I'm pretty new to the Spring Framework, I've been playing around with it and putting a few samples apps together for the purposes of evaluating Spring MVC for use in an upcoming company project. So far I really like what I see in Spring MVC, seems very easy to use and encourages you to write classes that are very unit test-friendly. Just as an exercise, I'm writing a main method for one of my sample/test projects. One thing I'm unclear about is the exact differences between BeanFactory and ApplicationContext - which is appropriate to use in which conditions? I understand that