Not necessarily. Spring can mimic a plugin-system if you enable auto-discovery of beans in certain packages or by creating a app-context which contains all the plugins that you want to be visible. The former is more flexible (just add JARs to the classpath to add plugins) while the latter is slightly more secure (the "plugin" system will only see beans that you are aware of).
The next step is to define a common interface, say IPlugin
to find and configure each plugin.
Now, you can get a list in a plugin manager using
@Autowired
private List<IPlugin> plugins;
This line of code will locate all known/visible beans which implement IPlugin
, collect them in a list and inject them into the field plugins
.