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

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

@Primary@Repositorypublic 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.

@Primarypublic 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.