What's the advantage of using Spring's BeanFactory

[Mullin Yu]

what's the advantage of using Spring's BeanFactory?

e.g.
public class SimpleFactoryBean implements FactoryBean {

public Class getObjectType() {
return TestBean.class;
}

public boolean isSingleton() {
return false;
}

public Object getObject() {
return new TestBean("Alef [factory]");
}
}
� and a small piece of XML:

[Sabarish Sasidharan]

FactoryBean is different from BeanFactory. BeanFactory is the lightweight container reference that you can use to get to the beans in the container. But FactoryBean is a bean that does not return a reference to itself but to an object it instantiates at run time. So when you inject a factory bean into bean X, the bean X will have a reference to the class instantiated by the factory bean and not the factory bean itself.