Front Controller Pattern

I'm going to implement the front controller pattern. As it is implemented in the blueprints (Pet Store), requestmappings.xml and screendefinitions.xml are only read upon start up. Thus, the web application has to be restarted to carry out changes.

I'd like the possibility to perform changes to these files without restarting the app. How should I go about? As I don't want to read the file for every request, I need some kind of cache. But this cache should have some kind of automatic updating mechanism when the files are changed.

Has anyone done something like this for large web applications?

[633 byte] By [afloom] at [2007-9-26 13:38:47]