There is no silver bullet solution for this and it's a matter of taste. Tapestry has a number of built in SymbolProviders. You can specify a combination of system properties, init-params to the tapestry filter, factory defaults and application defaults
http://tapestry.apache.org/symbols.html If you would like to configure your symbols in a properties file, there is a HowTo page here: http://wiki.apache.org/tapestry/Tapestry5HowToReadSymbolsFromPropertiesFile
