Zoloft withdrawal is making me feel a bit loopy, but I'm still happy to be done with the stuff.
Jon Bosak is trying to create a "Universal Business Language" (UBL). Here's a poorly-written summary of a laughably ambitious project:
The purpose of the UBL TC [Technical Committee] is to quickly develop a synthesis of existing XML business libraries, to develop a coordinated set of XML grammatical components that will allow trading partners to unambiguously identify the business documents to be exchanged in a particular business context. The TC will align the vocabulary and structures of UBL with the vocabulary and structures of other already existing business libraries, and implement a mechanism for the generation of context-specific schemas for basic business documents and their components through the application of transformation rules to a common XML source library.
Wigwam looks interesting:
Say I were to check in to the revision control system a config file for my application server that included a connection to some.machine.com:3301 for some database. It would really screw up testing for the next developer who checked out that change to his own playpen, and needed the software to connect to hismachine.machine.com:3394. It would be worse if that change made it to the live running server application and broke it as a result.
Wigwam [solves this problem] by giving users standard places to store this type of information and standard methods for getting at it and using it for configuration.... This way, almost everything is tracked by the revision control system, and the difference between development, testing, and live installations of the project is minimized.
Other solutions to the same problem, as proposed on the javalanche listserv: environment-specific property files, JNDI, and Ant.