Hey there...
I'm actually the person who wrote the question. I signed up at work but gave JavaRanch my home email address. We're not allowed to check our home email at work, so I asked a co-worker if I could post my question under her name until I was able to login later.
Since my post I was able to figure out a solution. Talking to some other programmers at work who are more familiar with Spring, they recommended using "BeanFactory". Using that I was able to pull in the spring context xml file, and then loading up the bean.
Previously, I had been given an example where the bean is loaded based off an attribute sent in the servlet request object. And being rather new to the whole
Java world, it's still a bit uncomfortable for me to stray from the examples I'm given.
Thanks for your reply, but I'm good to go now!