On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 6:58 PM, Richard O'Keefe <ok@cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:

A colleague just asked me
I'm trying to kick off some work into middleware for configuration of large-scale,
distributed systems. Have you come across any elegant, declarative configuration
languages used for this sort of job?

I've found a couple of papers, but I've never _used_ any of the systems.
Any recommendations?

I haven't used any "configuration languages" to develop my own configuration system. But I have used a combination of Haskell and JSON to handle configuration in many applications. (And I'm currently working on one for HandbrakeCLI, the video encoding tool)

The general idea is straight forward. Create configuration data types to represent the variable run-time data. Read from JSON/YAML/etc and deserialize to the internal Haskell representation. Let the configuration "runners" interpret the configuration in terms of IO actions calling to external tools.