Does anyone know of a good tutorial (or any tutorial) or any GPL code
that I can look at to show me how to do my own Factory ???

Ta

Jaj

Since you are tossing Sun's preference mechanism aside, you could just
do this with a class with a static get and save method where you
specify the full node name on each get/save.

Another thought is JDK 1.5 Preferences has an xml import/export built
in.

If you want to replace the official preferences here is what to do:

Write yourself a JAIPreferences class that extends the abstract
Preferences class.

Then write a class that implements the PreferencesFactory interface.
basically all it does is return new JAIPreferences().

If the system property java.util.prefs.PreferencesFactory is defined,
then it is taken to be the fully-qualified name of a class
implementing the PreferencesFactory interface.

there is another method of registering your factory with a magic jar
entry described under Preferences.