Java beans in Spring can also have their collection properties populated in the beans.xml file. The collection properties here mean things like List, Map and Array.
For example, if you want to create a JPA EntityManagerFactory with a set of connection properties, these properties can be configured in beans.xml like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" [...]