Autowiring two beans implementing same interface - how to set default bean to autowire?

Question

I'd suggest marking the Hibernate DAO class with @Primary, i.e. (assuming you used @Repository on HibernateDeviceDao):

@Primary
@Repository
public class HibernateDeviceDao implements DeviceDao

This way it will be selected as the default autowire candididate, with no need to autowire-candidate on the other bean.

Also, rather than using @Autowired @Qualifier, I find it more elegant to use @Resource for picking specific beans, i.e.

@Resource(name="jdbcDeviceDao")
DeviceDao deviceDao;

What about @Primary?

Indicates that a bean should be given preference when multiple candidates are qualified to autowire a single-valued dependency. If exactly one 'primary' bean exists among the candidates, it will be the autowired value. This annotation is semantically equivalent to the <bean> element's primary attribute in Spring XML.

@Primary
public class HibernateDeviceDao implements DeviceDao

Or if you want your Jdbc version to be used by default:

<bean id="jdbcDeviceDao" primary="true" class="com.initech.service.dao.jdbc.JdbcDeviceDao">

@Primary is also great for integration testing when you can easily replace production bean with stubbed version by annotating it.

For Spring 2.5, there's no @Primary. The only way is to use @Qualifier.

The use of @Qualifier will solve the issue.
Explained as below example : 
public interface PersonType {} // MasterInterface

@Component(value="1.2") 
public class Person implements  PersonType { //Bean implementing the interface
@Qualifier("1.2")
    public void setPerson(PersonType person) {
        this.person = person;
    }
}

@Component(value="1.5")
public class NewPerson implements  PersonType { 
@Qualifier("1.5")
    public void setNewPerson(PersonType newPerson) {
        this.newPerson = newPerson;
    }
}

Now get the application context object in any component class :

Object obj= BeanFactoryAnnotationUtils.qualifiedBeanOfType((ctx).getAutowireCapableBeanFactory(), PersonType.class, type);//type is the qualifier id

you can the object of class of which qualifier id is passed.