Nothing is wrong with letting your program read it's startup parameters from a properties file (and thus doing all the wiring up of classes in code yourself). S

Nothing is wrong with letting your program read it's startup parameters from a properties file (and thus doing all the wiring up of classes in code yourself). Spring and it's bean.xml files are meant as a replacement option for that for when you find that doing-it-yourself is too tedious/too much code.