Classloading from XML, deployment descriptors

[blahblahblahh]

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?

[blahblahblahh]

The only place I could think of to look for DD alternatives was in XML (de)serialization, and XMLEncoder looks quite nice. But...it already appears to have had an attack of PERL-itis, and ended up with so many ways of doing the same thing, and of abbreviating things, that debugging simple user mistakes is a nightmare in any non-trivially-small set of classes .

We could perhaps adopt a subset of XMLE's schema, at least ensuring other people recognized it on contact, and making interoperability easier. But...how many people actually use the XMLE ?