HornetQ journal creation delays first start-up about 60seconds on a slow laptop, and this looks really bad to developers.

Please change the default settings of hornetq-configuration.xml to:

...
<!-- Default journal file size is 10Mb, reduced here to 1Mb for faster first boot -->
<journal-file-size>${hornetq.journal.file.size:1048576}</journal-file-size>

<!-- Default journal min file is 2, increase for higher average msg rates -->
<journal-min-files>${hornetq.journal.min.files:2}</journal-min-files>
...

I.e reduce journal min files to 2 (it was 10), and journal file size to 1Mb (from 10Mb). If the user wants to take the hit he/she can use the hornetq.journal.file.size/hornetq.journal.min.files properties when starting the server.

Also, the configuration files for HornetQ really belong to the hornetq-int integration project, so that we don't have to release hornetq in order to change configuration parameters.

i.e. put them under jboss-trunk/hornetq-int/src/resource/config