"rbuckvrsn" wrote : | Is there any decent documentation on what the syntax of these XML files is, and what it means? I have not found much anywhere. Perhaps if there was some documentation on how this XML format works, I could figure out what you wrote below. | There is almost complete User Guide for MC 2.0 in SVN trunk: http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jbossas/projects/microcontainer/trunk/docs... It covers basic use cases for MC's xml. We don't have a concrete release yet, but you can very easily build it with maven2. "rbuckvrsn" wrote : | I see one example that creates a bean for every property in existence, which does not scale particularly well. I see that in XML people have tons of coding to do when it ought to be something simple to override the internals of property resolution. I see examples that are not dynamic; the property values may change at runtime. I am not sure if any of these examples will allow the JBoss properties manager to be used as a fallback; it looks like each case uses the external repository only. | XML always has that problem. We'll provide some generic dependency handling via http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBMICROCONT-167. And I've just started with porting annotation features into MC's BeanMetaData. For the runtime property changes, you then need some other mechanism - String is immutable. ;-) "rbuckvrsn" wrote : | Are there other options? | AOP? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4066031#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...