Commons Configuration looks interesting, although at first glance it doesn't seem to go down the ResourceBundle route - which I think is a must if it is to tie into JSTL's/Stripes' property mechanism (I forgot to mention that this is for a web app).
Apart from that, I don't seem to have explained the issue well. I don't foresee using files at all, as I don't see any benefits in that. The ResourceBundle class will load them directly from a DB. The missing piece is an editor for those properties that reads and writes from/to the DB, and which is savvy about multi-lingual
Java properties. There must be thousands of web sites out there that have run into this exact problem, so I was hoping someone had encountered it.
Or are folks not using properties beyond a certain size of the site, and opt for a proper CMS instead? What I'm looking is actually a CMS - just not a full-featured one like OpenCms or Alfresco, but one limited to Java properties.