right, the enum cannot be instantianted in the classical bean way.
maybe with a converter type factory ?
http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/ch05s05.html
but to have that enum live in a spring mapped bean, I would think we would still need to create a wrapper bean, that contains a property, that is of the type enum, that woud have its value set using the custom type mapper.