Loading Beans in Order

Ok, I'm new to this forum and pretty new to Spring in general. I like it a lot but I have been having a few problems. The biggest one right now is that I want to load my beans in a particular order. I know I can use the "depends" attribute but I have so many beans that I don't want to go in and add a depends for each one just to have to change it later because the order is now switched up.

Is there some way to order the beans' instantiation? Maybe by putting them in particular order or by creating some sort of "orderBean" that would instantiate in the order I specify? Thanks.

cmon I know one of you spring gurus knows the answer to this one

AFAIK, "depends" is the only tag that you can use. Spring offers posibility for lazy loading and including other files which can affect the initialization so I recommend you use this one even though at the beginning it might be difficult because otherwise you can run into subtle problems...

P.S. I don't pretend to be a Spring guru.