Autowiring is precisely the recommended method for doing this.
If that's really not an option, a possible alternative would be to create your own annotations, and have a build-time step that processes classes with these annotations to generate the XML. Alternatively, you could just put the names of classes in a text file, and write code that just loops over the entries in that text file and spits out the needed XML. I'm not aware of anything like either of these though.