Weblogic 9.0 Beta is available today (sadly for windows only), and check out it's support for deployment plans. I've only taken a quick look, but it looks like this is the answer to my prayers. You build your app, but then specify what parameters (anywhere in a deployment descriptor or the weblogic configuration itself) that will need/are allowed to be overridden at deployment time. Then sysadmins override those (with a local XML file I think), and it will insert them automatically.
I'm reading this right, this allows your J2EE app to be one EAR, plus one deployment plan XML file. If this works, I'm in heaven.
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