Question

My web application is installed on many customer servers. Since the app needs to send emails (password recovery), I need a good way of setting up the email server info for each customer.

Should I just have an xml file where each customer can fill in the email server info, and the app picks it up from there?

Are there better ways?

Answer 1

Without more information it’s hard to give you specific suggestions. For standalone apps, I would tend toward using simple properties files (javadoc).

• They are simple to handle in Java (you can read and write them easily, they are backed by a Map.
• They can be edited by hand in an emergency much easier than XML.

There are some drawbacks:

• They are ASCII (ISO-8859-1) only, so you can run into trouble if you want to write extended unicode characters. If you write and read the file from Java, you will have no problems – the Properties class will do this conversion for you.
• Some SMTP servers require authentication. It is bad practice to store unencrypted passwords into properties files, which may be readable by everyone. In this case, you would need to come up with some sort of reversible encryption mechanism, which is a challenge in itself. You’d have to do this for XML too. You could specify that the user secure this file themselves, using permissions, though this is nowhere near as strong as encrypting it yourself.

I’m sure there are better ways – and you’ll get lots of answers – but IMHO, these files are simple, relatively rugged and easy to handle.