Java News from Wednesday, December 24, 2008

The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons Configuration 1.6, 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.

According to Olive Heger, "This release is in line with the previous 1.5 release: there are no big changes or spectacular new features, but a lot of smaller bug fixes and enhancements. There are also a few new features, e.g. support for the xml:space attribute in XMLConfiguration, or multiple enhancements of DefaultConfigurationBuilder. All changes are source and binary compatible with the previous release."