So I think the point Tom is making is 'readability' of the configuration. And that the readabilty increases by not having to 'jump' through the file. We seem to agree that normalization by itself is a good thing :). So that said, I actually like to hide the details (pull out duplicate info) and give is human readable names. For example when I reference the jndi-* parameter I can care less. I'd rather see the servername like "jboss-4.0.4" or something. I guess my brain likes to see the big picture first.. I don't think tooling affects this, although tooling will be easier when the thing is fully normalized. --Kurt View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3993506#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...