What makes the Spring framework a lightweight container?

Question

When people mention that Spring is a lightweight containter compared to other frameworks, do they mean? That it occupies less memory in the system or it does not have the op

Answer 1

Whether it is "lightweight" or "heavyweight", it is all about comparison. We consider Spring to be lightweight when we are comparing to normal J2EE container. It is lightweight in the sense of extra memory footprint for the facilities provided (e.g. Transaction Control, Life Cycle, Component dependency management)

However, there are sometimes other criteria to compare for the "weight" of a container, e.g. intrusiveness in design and implementation; facilities provided etc.

Ironically, Spring is sometimes treated as heavy weight container when compared to other POJO-based container, like Guice and Plexus.