Sure, you can still wire your static beans if you want to, but much more excitingly you can use component scanning to look for beans at runtime. No fiddling with XML at all.

Mark Fisher does a very good job of explaining the full impact of this in his InfoQ article on Spring 2.5. Also there is the much more comprehensive Introduction to 2.5 by Rod Johnson on TSS.com.

But what really caught my interest was Interface 21 CTO Adrian Colyer's elaboration on Spring's investment into the OSGi spec. If you listen to him you suddenly realize why exactly the runtime wiring became necessary. The upcoming Spring OSGi API takes the fact into account that Spring configuration at runtime is cool and all, but modularity gets ever more important. Coyler talks about all the interest the application server vendors have in OSGi and how big Web application projects may look like in the future.

In large applications we may see lots of dynamic service OSGi modules, wired together at runtime by Spring, that, as a whole, make up one or more applications. Spring takes into account that OSGi services may come and go at any given moment. Thus updating parts of the application (deploying a new service) instead of changing out a monolithic WAR file becomes a possibility. Exciting stuff. I will look into that some more.

Of course there is plenty of other cool stuff in 2.5, just check out the SpringSource blog or read the Changelog.