The Java distributed application I work on seems to munge together deployment, configuration, management, crash recovery, etc. I'm hoping to simplify these aspects of the application by separating them more cleanly, but I'm not sure I know where to draw the lines between them. Are there principles, guidelines, or best practices that would guide me by saying things like, "this functionality comes under the heading of configuration and should be implemented using this sort of approach, while that functionality comes under the heading of management and should be implemented using that sort of approach?" Any documents or books you can recommend that weigh in on this? Maybe certain tools that embody a model of how these aspects ought to be divided up?
Mark