How do you maintain java webapps in different staging environments?

Question

You might have a set of properties that is used on the developer machine, which varies from developer to developer, another set for a staging environment, and yet another fo

Answer 1

Separate configuration files, stored in the source control repository and updated by hand. Typically configuration does not change radically between one version and the next so synchronization (even by hand) isn't really a major issue.

For highly scalable systems in production environments I would seriously recommend a scheme in which configuration files are kept in templates, and as part of the build script these templates are used to render "final" configuration files (all environments should use the same process).