It is currently common to build a number of releases from a single code base. For example, a development release, a QA release, a production release and perhaps customer-specific releases. However, these releases seem to differ mostly in the contents of their XML configuration files, and then only very little. Maintaining all these slightly different configuration files is a real nuisance.

XConf was created to simplify this maintenance. Its fundamental premise is that a single development-release (or production-release) configuration file is created and maintained, and is processed by XConf at either build or deployment time into an appropriate release by applying one or more XML-based scripts. Each script contains only the differences required to create the appropriate release, thus removing the need for the mass duplication of configuration files.

This is not really a new solution, since XSLT has been used in the past to do this quite successfully, but XPath can get a little arcane, and maintaining transformation scripts using XSLT can become really complex very quickly. XConf uses a very simple and compact method of specifying elements that need to be processed, and provides some very useful constructs to make transformations painless.