Referencing Spring beans in Properties collections

It is some times desired to reference Spring beans when injecting properties into some bean. The problem is that the <props> tag doesn’t support references – it supports plain string values only.
While trying to resolve such issue I stumbled onto a discussion in the Spring-Source community forums: http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?t=63939.
While adding non-string values into Properties is problematic, adding string values that originate from a bean-value, or a bean’s-property-value, or something similar is a valid usecase. I posted my solution in the thread, but just for your convinience, here goes:
In general, as long as you are using string values, you can can safely replace the <props> tag with <map>:

  <props>
    <prop key="foo">blahhhh</prop>
    <prop key="bar">arrrrgh</prop>
  </props>

Is the same as

  <map>
    <entry key="foo" value="blahhhh"/>
    <entry key="bar">
      <bean class="java.lang.String">
       <constructor-arg value="arrrrgh"/>
      </bean>
    </entry>

    <!-- and you can even do -->
    <entry key="baz" value-ref="someBean"/>
  </map>