Hi Ceki/all! due to my recent involvement in Modello[1], I started experimenting how the Modello approach could benefit existing projects that require to parse XML (but also JSON and YAML) configurations, and took Logback as a good example where doing some experiments... What made me curious to made that experiment, is the fact that current Joran approach is based to SAX APIs + reflection - elements are introspected at runtime and components will be injected - while the Modello approach is based on streaming APIs and introspection analysis is performed at compile-time, generating the "parse-tree" and the (un)marshallers. So, I pushed an initial/prototypal logback-joran2 module in my personal fork[2], which APIs are not integrated with the rest of the project yet. Configuration elements are defined in the Modello descriptor[3] which enable the generation of Java APIs (included inner Builders/static utility methods), the XML Reader/Writer (based on StAX APIs) and the XSD that users could integrate in their preferred XML IDE in order to enable the validation and auto-complete editing. With that approach, users can create their configurations programmatically, for free. Final format is a little different to the current one, have a look to a sample[4] generated via these APIs, but I am working to keep the original format as much as I can. Have a look also at how simple would be reading and writing configurations. WDYT? I already applied the Logback license header, in case you are interested on exploring the Modello approach a little more and want me to push request. Have a nice day, all the best, -Simo [1] http://modello.codehaus.org/index.html [2] https://github.com/simonetripodi/logback [3] https://github.com/simonetripodi/logback/blob/master/logback-joran2/src/main... [4] https://github.com/simonetripodi/logback/blob/master/logback-joran2/src/test... [5] https://github.com/simonetripodi/logback/blob/master/logback-joran2/src/test... http://people.apache.org/~simonetripodi/ http://www.99soft.org/