What is the difference between Bean Factory and ApplicationContext?

Following are some of the differences:

• 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.
• The application context implements MessageSource, an interface used to obtain localized messages, with the actual implementation being pluggable.