On the surface, an application context is same as a bean factory. But application context offers much more..
Application contexts provide a means for resolving text messages, including support for i18n of those messages.
Application contexts provide a generic way to load file resources, such as 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, Hence provides an application with access to deployment-specific Resource instances.
MessageSource support: The application context implements MessageSource, an interface used to obtain localized messages, with the actual implementation being pluggable
