title: Changing Spring PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer to read from another source
body: <p>I'd like to extend/replace the Spring PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer to read from a web server as opposed to properties files. </p>
  
  <p>A bit of background:</p>
  
  <p>I work on a project, and we're finding the number of properties files located on the users systems is getting a little unwieldy. We'd like to replace these files with a 'config server' which will store basic key/value pairs and serve them when the user starts up the app.</p>
  
  <p>To avoid making too many changes, I'd like to change the way the PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer finds properties - rather than implementing an entirely new way to manage properties. So on startup - Spring will read all properties from a url, and feed these into my spring config xml in the same way as it would have with actual files.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Bonus!</strong></p>
  
  <p>If anyone has any ideas how to do this where properties are reloaded from the server <strong>only when they change</strong>, will get bonus points (I have no idea if I have the ability to assign bonus points, but I'll try!). That would be a 'nice to have, if there's not too much effort involved' solution.</p>