Per War settings not in the War for per site config customization?

[Randall Parker <ra...@nls.net>]

I want to have settings/properties that are for a particular WAR file but that are for a particular install (ie a particular server at 
a particular site). 

As I see it per site customization properties file should not go in the WAR itself as then the user would have to unpack the 
war and edit the file and then every new WAR version update would require messing around with saving and restoring that 
file before and after each update of a war is installed.

So where can one put settings that code in a single a war will be able to get access to?

I see in Tomcat 3.3b1 that in the TOMCAT_HOME\conf dir one can use apps-<xxxx>.xml files where xxxx is for xxxx.war. 
Is this only for doing the Context tag for path and docBase? Or can one put one's own tags or attributes in there inside
the Context? If so, then how would one access those settings from a servlet?

Also, is the answer any different for 3.3 vs 4.0?