Java .properties files as strongly typed classes

Question

Is there way to get properties files as strongly typed classes? I guess there are code generators but doing it with annotations would be much cooler.

What I mean is;

Answer 1

There are countless of framework that achieve that for XML with various degree of configuration needed. The standard one bundled with Java is JaxB but it is not exactly a one liner xml persistence framework ...

The problem is that using properties file will only works better than XML (or JSON, ...) on the most trivial classes. When the class become a bit more complex, the properties file will become a nightmare. Another problem is that with trivial classes - there is not much difference between Xml and properties.

That means that the scope of the project will be rather limited. Mostly useful for project having loads of simple properties files.

In big application I worked with, strongly-type reading of properties file is done quite often using a simple factory-method.

 Foo foo = Foo.loadFrom("foo.properties");

 class Foo {
    static Foo loadFrom(String fileName) {
         Properties props = new Properties();
         props.load(...);

         Foo foo = new Foo();
         foo.setKeyFoo(props.get("KeyFoo"));
         ...
         return foo;
    }
   ...
 }