@Configuration Indicates that a class declares one or more @Bean
methods and may be processed by the Spring container to generate bean
definitions and service requests for those beans at runtime@Component Indicates that an annotated class is a “component”. Such
classes are considered as candidates for auto-detection when using
annotation-based configuration and classpath scanning.@Configuration is meta-annotated with @Component, therefore
@Configuration classes are candidates for component scanning
You can see more here:
http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/4.0.4.RELEASE/javadoc-api/org/springframework/context/annotation/Configuration.html
A @Configuration is also a @Component, but a @Component cannot act like a @Configuration.