There are two main pieces to the Domtool 2 system: a programming language and a system for distributed configuration implemented around it.
1. The Language
The Domtool language is a statically-typed, pure functional programming language influenced by Haskell and ML. It uses the function as the basic unit of abstraction, both for describing primitive configuration directives and higher-level subroutines built from them.
Configuration itself as modeled as a stateful process of making a series of changes to the world, and this process is modeled inside the Domtool language with a configuration monad. The monad also includes the notion of typed environment variables that are a principled alternative to default function parameters, where it's possible to change defaults locally via lexical scoping.
Not all configuration directives are valid in all contexts. For instance, it only makes sense to specify that a file is a CGI script if you're working in the context of an Apache virtual host. Further, some Apache directives are only valid in the context of a particular directory. Values in the configuration monad are labeled with predicates in a tiny logic describing valid contexts for their use, and the type checker won't let you use a directive elsewhere.
The language interpreter also allows the addition of new base types by providing membership predicates implemented in SML. For instance, the standard library has a type for the name of a domain that the current user is allowed to configure. Rich types like this make it possible to use types of library functions as machine-checked documentation that often doesn't need to be supplemented with English.
2. Distributed Configuration
As the language allows primitive functions to be implemented externally in SML code, it's possible to build all sorts of systems on top of it. The one that we're interested in here is a system for changing configuration of network daemons running on multiple machines.
The basic system has three tiers.
The first tier is the members, merrily configuring away, laughing, crying, enjoying life's ups and downs, and sometimes attempting to configure things that they ought not to, through honest mistakes or (God forbid) malice. They write their configuration files as programs in the Domtool language and type check them locally to make sure that they will be accepted. If type checking succeeds, the scripts are sent over our LAN to a daemon process living on our main server.
This daemon type-checks the files again (since we don't want to have to trust users to do it right!) and, assuming they check out, executes them to modify a directory tree on our shared AFS filesystem. This tree looks a lot like /etc/domains does now, except that it's populated with summaries outputted by the daemon on how other daemons should behave.
At this point, we reach the final tier. A given set of changes may affect any subset of the configurable servers. The main configuration daemon sends each affected server a note listing the files that have changed, and each of these servers then retrieves the changes from AFS and uses them to rewrite its local configuration in a service-specific way, restarting any local daemons that need restarting.