Before you learn the difference between @Component, @Service, @Controller, and @Repository annotations in the Spring framework, it's important to understand the role of @Component annotation in Spring. During the initial release of Spring, all beans are used to be declared in an XML file. For a large project, this quickly becomes a massive task, and Spring guys recognize the problem rather quickly. In later versions, they provide annotation-based dependency injection and Java-based configuration. From Spring 2.5 annotation-based dependency injection was introduced, which automatically scans and registers classes as Spring bean which is annotated using @Component annotation.