A uniform strategy for the general problem of providing customer editors and initialization strings for beans (all “dynabeans” inherit from a common bean class that incorporates this strategy). This is then extended to allow the initialization strings to be stored in a relational database. With this approach, many changes to the application can be handled by adjusting the database version of the bean definition, without a need to touch the underlying code. This reduces down time for the application, and also improves application stability.