In order to "bootstrap" yourself into the world of content beans from the CoreMedia Unified API, you need to use the content bean factory programmatically, for example from within a Controller. The factory API is simple, the most relevant method is ContentBeanFactory#createBeanFor(Content). For example:

Content content = ... // for example through a query
Article article =
  (Article)contentBeanFactory.createBeanFor(content);

The controller needs access to the content bean factory. Since the controller itself typically is a bean defined in the application context, you can inject the factory reference into the controller object:

<bean id="myController" class="...">
  <property name="contentBeanFactory" ref="contentBeanFactory"/>
  ...
</bean>

This fragment will invoke #setContentBeanFactory on the controller supplying an instance of the referenced factory.