You may decide to define a spring bean to contain some configuration (eg. JDBC configuration). You may then reference this configuration from both the mule configuration and from an implementation class.

The implementation class and the mule configuration may use different runtime classpaths. This means that referencing the spring bean from an absolute path or a relative path in the mule configuration may work but from the implementation class it will only use path's relative to its runtime classpath (typically the target classes folder for an eclipse project).