About 9 months ago, while I was teaching my class on enterprise computing, I had the idea that I'd rather store my EJB configurations in an LDAP server than in property files.  They'd be easier to manage and I could put all the configurations in a single (redundant) place that was network accessible.  It didn't take me long to realize that the same kind of LDAP based configuration server would be a big win for places that run a lot of web servers (or any other server for that matter) as well.  Server configuration used to eat up gobs of time at Excite\\@Home.  Seems that Covalent Technologies had the same idea (at least when it came to Apache).