Best Alternatives to Property Files in Java

content-managementjavaproperties

Hey I an working on the product which is live at multiple portals. The product is developed in GWT, JAVA, Hibernate.

My question is : Whether there is any alternative of using property file in java.

My Requirement :

For one property key there are multiple values in live portal for each different portal.
Each time I change property file, I need to make the war again.
The loading of any of the property should not be time-consuming.

Any help or suggession would be apprecialble !!!

Best Answer

I find that JSON files mapped to my own classes does wonders. A few annotations are usually all that's needed to tell the JSON libs how to serialize the class. Outside of this you pretty much live in your code for the rest of the time and get all the benefits of it (refactors, compiler checks, code complete etc).

If you require more strict format and validation of the files then I go for XML by first creating an XSD. Then through JAXB generate the classes, from then on it's the same deal as JSON above. Bit more involved though, only go this route if you require exchanging the data in these files with system that naturally "speak" XML or if you need a strict validation but dont want to spend the time doing it manually.

Yaml can make a pretty good candidate for config. I tried it recently in a python project and I must say it was really nice ! Not sure what the Java yaml work is like though but I would be very surprised if one could not find a good resource to deal with the yaml format.

Related Solutions

Java – the alternative to an enterprise portal strategy in the Java space

First, you need to consider what problems Portal was designed to solve. Is it, as Wikipedia suggest, to bring together information from diverse sources in a unified way? If so, what other ways do we now have to do this?

Well, first, how do you bring together information from diverse sources? The obvious answer is to call a variety of (web) services. This introduces issues of contracts and network latency, blah blah blah, but these are things poorly solved by portal, so it's your call. Suppose the services are RESTful? Does that make managing contracts easier? Possibly.

Then, how do you unify the information? One of the issues that Portal solved was how to bring these disparate items onto one page, and have them load independently. AJAX has grown up since then, and the same effect can potentially be handled using XMLHttpRequest calls to the various (RESTful?) services to get your data, and then using a shared set of style sheets.

Will this work? It can and does. Is it more manageable than JSR286 portal servers? Probably. Are there still a ton of issues to overcome? Definitely. But it's a viable alternative.

Java Database Design – Best Way to Lazy Load Blob from Database

the other thing you can do is caching the value after the first load so you don't need to keep going back to the data base

public InputStream getData(){
    if(data==null){
        //Construct and execute SQL query.
        Blob blob = rs.getBlob(1);
        data = blob.getBinaryStream();
    }
    return data;
}

if you expect these blobs to be very large and want to be able to reclaim space while still keeping the record itself in memory you can use a WeakReference for the blob

private WeakReference<ByteArray[]> data;

public InputStream getData(){
    ByteArray[] local = data!=null?data.get():null;
    if(local==null){
        //Construct and execute SQL query.
        Blob blob = rs.getBlob(1);
        local = blob.getBinaryStream();
        data = new WeakReference<ByteArray[]>(local);
    }
    return local;
}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Java – the alternative to an enterprise portal strategy in the Java space

Java Database Design – Best Way to Lazy Load Blob from Database

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