How to define a List bean in Spring?

Here is one method:

<bean id="stage1" class="Stageclass"/>
<bean id="stage2" class="Stageclass"/>

<bean id="stages" class="java.util.ArrayList">
    <constructor-arg>
        <list>
            <ref bean="stage1" />
            <ref bean="stage2" />                
        </list>
    </constructor-arg>
</bean>

Import the spring util namespace. Then you can define a list bean as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/util
                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util-2.5.xsd">


<util:list id="myList" value-type="java.lang.String">
    <value>foo</value>
    <value>bar</value>
</util:list>

The value-type is the generics type to be used, and is optional. You can also specify the list implementation class using the attribute list-class.