What is the best way to manage configuration data

Question

I am working on a product suite which has 4 products. Right now, all of the configuration data is either in the XML or properties files.This approach is not maintainable as

Answer 1

If your applications work with a database, you can create a "configuration" table as follows:

create table configuration (mode char(3), key varchar(255), value varchar(1023));

You would initialize it using an init script, say init.sql with contents along the lines of:

insert into configuration values ('pro', 'param1', 'value1'); -- production
insert into configuration values ('dev', 'param1', 'value1'); -- development
insert into configuration values ('tst', 'param1', 'value1'); -- testing
...

The benefits of this approach are as follows:

• you version the script together with your code
• you can easily extend it to include per-user or per-group settings by adding a user/group id
• you can change the settings at runtime if you need to do so
• you get to use the same stack (JPA + DAO, Cayenne...) you normally use to handle core application data to handle configuration data