I’m surprised that no one cited the Jakarta Commons Configuration API (http://commons.apache.org/configuration/) to answer this question. It allows you to have a hierarchy of files (or other configuration sources like XML, JNDI, JDBC, etc.). That’s what Jeremy Seghi was talking about and it gives you a good way to have both defaults and local overrides as well.
The best part is that it is a tested working solution so you don’t have to go craft something yourself.