Property file discussion

["Dick, Brian E." <Br...@FMR.com>]

I'm looking for some advice and best practices to follow concerning
property files. I listed some topics below. If you have any other
suggestions, I'm all ears.

How do you manage your property files?

Describe your
- Support for project level property files.
- Support for shared property files.
- Support for OS platform (Unix vs. Windows) property files.
- Support for development life cycle (dev vs. test vs. QA vs. prod)
property files.

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Re: Property file discussion

[Antoine Levy-Lambert <an...@gmx.de>]

Hello Dick,

in an organization where I worked previously,
the property files were stored in a special Perforce depot ( or cvs 
module, ...) which had the particularity :
- not to be branched according to codelines (since properties generally 
apply to whatever is live currently, and
are edited/submitted at short notice)
- to be divided first by development life cycle phase (dev, int, prd),
- then to be divided again by deployment site (tok, nyc, fra, par, ldn, ...)
There was no subdivision according to OS platform, because everything 
was deployed on the same platform.
The property files were read in Java by a library which could manage 
property files including other property files,
and maybe stuff like include ${os.family}.properties
When an application server was deployed, it always had a config folder, 
which contained the relevant property files
taken from Perforce. The property files were then left untouched for the 
application server until a new update deployment
was done.

In another organization where I have some experience, property files are 
also in a special depot,
and they are synced to head automatically every 10 minutes on all hosts, 
which all have a directory
where they are synced.

All this boils down to : property files tend to be more data than code.

Ideally, I would use a LDAP server to store property like information. 
Then you have a central point of update.
You can do migration scripts for your LDAP data with ldapmodify, 
ldapadd, ... or a LDIF file.

Since LDAP data model is a tree, it fits well with these structures 
where you split per lifecycle phase,
location, maybe operating system, ...

Also if it is designed properly, you can avoid repeating the same data. 
For instance you can create a LDAP key
containing the access parameters to a particular database, and refer all 
the applications which need to use
this to this key.

Cheers,

Antoine


Dick, Brian E. wrote:

>I'm looking for some advice and best practices to follow concerning
>property files. I listed some topics below. If you have any other
>suggestions, I'm all ears.
>
>How do you manage your property files?
>
>Describe your
>- Support for project level property files.
>- Support for shared property files.
>- Support for OS platform (Unix vs. Windows) property files.
>- Support for development life cycle (dev vs. test vs. QA vs. prod)
>property files.
>
>  
>



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