The central artifact in Spring’s new Java-configuration support is the @Configuration -annotated class. These classes consist principally of @Bean -annotated methods that define instantiation, configuration, and initialization logic for objects that are managed by the Spring IoC container.

What is configuration class?

@Configuration annotation indicates that a class declares one or more @Bean methods and may be processed by the Spring container to generate bean definitions and service requests for those beans at runtime. … This is called Spring Java Config feature (using @Configuration annotation).

What is Spring configuration class?

Spring @Configuration annotation is part of the spring core framework. Spring Configuration annotation indicates that the class has @Bean definition methods. So Spring container can process the class and generate Spring Beans to be used in the application.