Question

I apologize if this is a duplicate, I couldn’t find anything describing exactly what I wanted. I’m building a webapp that has a number of different properties that need to change depending on the environment in addition to a number of .properties configuration files that need to change as well. Right now I have a global enum (DEVELOPMENT, STAGING, and PRODUCTION) that is used to determine which string constants are used in the application and then I utilize a bunch of comments in the configuration files to switch between database servers, etc. There has got to be a better way to do this…I’d ideally like to be able to make one change in one file (A large block comment would be fine…) to adjust these configurations. I saw this post where the answer is to utilize JNDI which I really like, but it would seem as though I would need to call that from a servlet that starts up or a bean that gets initialized on start in order to use it for my log4j or JDBC configuration files.

Does anybody have any strategies for dealing with this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I’m not sure if this strategy will apply to your situation, but in the past I’ve successfully used our build tool (ant in that case) to build different war files depending on the profile. So you would have multiple log4j configuration files in your source tree, and then delete the ones you don’t want from the final build depending on the profile that was used to build it.

Traceability becomes slightly hard (i.e. difficult sometimes to figure out which one was used to build it), but it’s a very clean solution, from your code perspective, since it’s all done in your build script.