What alternatives are there to J2EE “deployment descriptors” for managing the loading of classes and/or instantiating of objects from text files (or any text-based source; e.g. could be just any char-based inputstream)?
At grex, we’ve never used DD’s because they’re so unwieldy, hard to read, hard to understand, and non self-explanatory. We also had need of more complex behaviour, so we rolled our own equivalent for prototypes some years ago…the thing is, we’re still using our proprietary equivalent now, because it’s done the job fine. But it has it’s own issues, and rather than just patch it up I’m sure there must be some better open standard than J2EE-dd’s around by now (last time I checked, it seemed everyone was still using fairly large apps just to edit dd’s, largely enforced by their kludginess; i.e. editing via a decent XML editor wasn’t realistic - you need more help than that).
Or…maybe DD editors these days are sufficiently advanced and compatible with each other that you don’t even care what’s in the DD?