In declarative programming, the code states what it will perform, but not how it will be performed. This is totally the opposite of imperative programming, where we need to state stepwise what we will execute. The declarative programming can be achieved using XML and annotations. Spring Framework keeps all configurations in XML from where it can be used by the framework to maintain the life cycle of a bean. As the development happened in Spring Framework, the 2.0 onward version gave an alternative to XML configuration with a wide range of annotations.