Spring - Bean Scopes

What is spring Bean scopes ?

it is just an interview question which i have faced!!! A simple one.... Any way i couldn't answer it . 

For the sake of next interview i am going to answer it in here:

When defining a <bean> in Spring, you have the option of declaring a scope for that bean. For example, To force Spring to produce a new bean instance each time one is needed, you should declare the bean's scope attribute to be prototype. Similar way if you want Spring to return the same bean instance each time one is needed, you should declare the bean's scope attribute to be singleton.

The Spring Framework supports following five scopes, three of which are available only if you use a web-aware ApplicationContext.

Scope	Description
singleton	This scopes the bean definition to a single instance per Spring IoC container (default).
prototype	This scopes a single bean definition to have any number of object instances.
request	This scopes a bean definition to an HTTP request. Only valid in the context of a web-aware Spring ApplicationContext.
session	This scopes a bean definition to an HTTP session. Only valid in the context of a web-aware Spring ApplicationContext.
global-session	This scopes a bean definition to a global HTTP session. Only valid in the context of a web-aware Spring ApplicationContext.