Can you explain the purpose and use of the Scope annotation in the context of Spring?

The @Scope annotation in Spring is used to define the scope of a bean — that is, how long an instance of the bean exists and how it is created.

Main scopes include:

• singleton (default) — one instance of the bean is created for the entire Spring context.
• prototype — a new instance is created each time the bean is requested.
• request — the bean lives within a single HTTP request (for web applications).
• session — the bean lives within an HTTP session.
• application — the bean lives within the ServletContext.

Example usage:

@Component
@Scope("prototype")
public class MyBean {
    // each call to getBean(MyBean.class) will create a new object
}

Thus, @Scope allows managing the lifecycle and scope of components in a Spring application.