Java News from Sunday, September 23, 2006

The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons Configuration 1.3, a Java class library that

enables an application to read configuration data from a variety of sources. Commons Configuration provides typed access to single, and multi-valued configuration parameters as demonstrated by the following code:

Double double = config.getDouble("number");
Integer integer = config.getInteger("number");

Configuration parameters may be loaded from the following sources:

• Properties files
• XML documents
• Property list files (.plist)
• JNDI
• JDBC Datasource
• System properties
• Applet parameters
• Servlet parameters

Different configuration sources can be mixed using a ConfigurationFactory and a CompositeConfiguration. Additional sources of configuration parameters can be created by using custom configuration objects. This customization can be achieved by extending AbstractConfiguration or AbstractFileConfiguration.

New features in this release include XPath support, a hierarchical alternative to ConfigurationFactory that allows more configuration options, and configuration listeners.