The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons Configuration 1.5, 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 aCompositeConfiguration
. Additional sources of configuration parameters can be created by using custom configuration objects. This customization can be achieved by extendingAbstractConfiguration
orAbstractFileConfiguration
.
According to Olive Heger, "The 1.5 release contains numerous bug fixes. Most of the addressed bugs are not really critical. There are also a few new features, e.g. a new Configuration class for accessing environment variables. Commons Configuration 1.5 is fully binary compatible to the previous version."