What in the world are Spring beans?

Question

I am yet to find a high-level definition of Spring beans that I can understand. I see them referenced often in Grails documentation and books, but I think that understanding

Answer 1

Spring beans are classes. Instead of instantiating a class (using new), you get an instance as a bean cast to your class type from the application context, where the bean is what you configured in the application context configuration. This way, the whole application maintains singleton-scope instance throughout the application. All beans are initialized following their configuration order right after the application context is instantiated. Even if you don't get any beans in your application, all beans instances are already created the moment after you created the application context.