I'm afraid as a user who has made considerable additions/customizations to server.xml (due to custom additions to the classes created by Spring using it) I'm very worried about having to port everything over to a "stored-in-DIT" model at some point in the future. Would it be feasible to maintain support for the old style config an parallel alternative ? Frankly I think XML is a much richer medium to express complex configuration settings as beans, then an LDAP schema which is better suited to modelling much simpler abstractions.
Also I'm not sure my users would react very favourably to having the start the server up (*especially* in a different mode) in order to make config changes. Would they still need to restart the server again afterwards to have the settings take effect? Aren't there concerns about rendering the server unstartable after editing settings, and if so isn't a single back-up file preferrable to have to back-up the entire system partition DIT? My 2c
