dependsOn attribute for loading the depended beans referenced by another bean. dependsOn is a bean tag that can indicate bean depends on another bean .

In this Example we can see when ApplicationContext Container is initialize first it will initialize Course Bean because we can put depends-on attribute ans give the dependency to the Student bean.

Course.java

package com.manish;

    public class Course {
    private String name;

    Course()
    {
        System.out.println("Course Bean Creation : Initializing Course Details...");
    }

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

}

Student.java

package com.manish;

public class Student 
{
    private int id;
    private String name;


    Student()
    {
        System.out.println("Student Bean");
    }
    public int getId() {
        return id;
    }
    public void setId(int id) {
        this.id = id;
    }
    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }
    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    }

App.java

package com.app;

import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;

import com.manish.Course;
import com.manish.Student;

public class App {

    /**
     * @param args
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // TODO Auto-generated method stub

        ApplicationContext ctx=new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(new String[]{"app-context.xml"});




    }

}

app-context.xml

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


<bean id="student" class="com.manish.Student" depends-on="course">
    <property name="id" value="1"></property>
    <property name="name" value="manish"></property>
    <property name="course" ref="course"></property>
</bean> 

<bean id="course" class="com.manish.Course">
    <property name="name" value="mca"></property>
</bean>



</beans>

Output:

Course Bean Creation : Initializing Course Details...
Student Bean