[joevandyk]

It's not J2EE.

Services and Factories are just syntax sugar on top of Providers, most times you won't need the full power of a Provider, so a Service is a name for a Provider with the commonly-needed defaults provided. Usually you won't need Providers, but they are there when you are doing something really weird.

From the docs: "The most verbose, but also the most comprehensive one is a Provider recipe. The remaining four recipe types — Value, Factory, Service and Constant — are just syntactic sugar on top of a provider recipe." https://code.angularjs.org/1.2.16/docs/guide/providers