The WARShield stuff progresses nicely: it now implements most of the feature-set I had in mind.
I have also implemented an event/listener method so that other ContextListeners / Servlets /Filters can get notified when the configuration is readily available, changes, etc.
Currently the configuration is stored in a single properties file, but I am adding a “multi-resource” method so that applications supply a set of template files which get populated with the configuration data (similar to the maven resource filtering by using the ${} notation).
I plan on adding hooks for containers such as Spring, so that they look for their data in the appropriate place and wait until the configuration is ready before reading it.