Spring annotations @Repository and @Service

The @Repository annotation (introduced in Spring 2.0) and @Service annotation (introduced in Spring 2.5) are specialization of the @Component annotation.

The main advantage of using @Repository or @Service over @Component is that it's easy to write an AOP pointcut that targets, for instance, all classes annotated with @Repository.

Also, the specialized annotations help to clearly demarcate application layers (in a standard 3 tiers application).

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6256331/spring-annotations-repository-and-service