Not sure there's enough benefit to standardizing a second file-based approach for setting the env entries. Typically the biggest issue we hear is that people would like to change the env-entry values *after* deployment, without having to update the contents of the deployed module. That's
where the proposed admin console support comes in handy.
There are certainly many complaints about the format of the standard deployment descriptors. XML is still cumbersome for name/value pairs compared to properties files, but the overall complexity of introducing yet a third approach to set metadata on top of annotations and the XML schemas has kept us from going there.
Keep in mind you can always use your own application-specific properties file altogether and
just skip env-entries. If you put it in the ejb-jar you can use the Class.getResource() method
to access it.
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