This is going to be a bit of a vague post; mostly just throwing some thoughts out there to see if anything sticks. A con and a pro to the value-factory approach. CON: There's some information loss. The default value (e.g. "1100") is lost to any management tools. [1] PRO: Information consolidation. A management tool can see the actual runtime value for the HAJNDI port. No need to cross-reference over to some PortManager service to figure out the runtime value. I think the pro outweighs the con. But this sounds like the kind of thing the metadata repository is meant to solve, e.g. very similar to Adrian's first post at http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=73653&am... Are we doing anything yet with populating the various levels of the metadata repository? [1] The information loss can be avoided by making the default a property of the "PortManager" bean rather than using the 'default' attribute of the value-factory element. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4167603#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...