Grails: Parsing existing spring bean XML

I am using Grails to build a front-end web-app to write and read from an existing schema. The data within the database is a collection of Spring bean XML definitions. I will want to parse the XML, allow my user to edit any of the properties using a friendly GUI and then save the whole bean definition back to the database. Obviously I can use an XML parser to work out the properties and what can be set. My question is, is there a smarter way to dynamically work with the bean definitions in Groovy / Grails either with built-in functionality or a plugin or should I just go with treating it all as bog-standard XML?

I'm very interested in extensibility (easily being able to deal with new definition types), efficiency (speed of processing) and elegance.