What is IOC container in spring?

Spring framework provides IOC container that is responsible to:

• create objects,
• wire objects together,
• configure the objects, and
• manage their life cycle from creation till destruction.

We can say that in spring application, objects are created, wired together and live in the spring container or IOC container.

In order to acheive all the above mentioned tasks by container, programmar need to configure spring application so that it is well aware about what object to create, configure and manage.

 

Spring container is at the core of the spring framework.

 

Spring container uses Dependency Injection to manage the components that make application. Thus the objects becomes easier to understand, reusable and easy to unit test. 

 

Two popularly used spring container are:

1. Bean factories
2. Application contexts