Spring reference manual says:
The scope of the Spring singleton is best described as "per container and per bean".
consider this code snippet:
ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("Beans.xml")
MyBean myobj=(MyBean)context.getBean("myBean"); //myBean is of singleton scope.
MyBean myobj1=(MyBean)context.getBean("myBean");
per container means that if we do context.getBean("myBean"); twice it will return same bean i.e. myobj==myobj1 is true.
But what does per bean in per container and per bean from above statement means?