Spring out of the box provides little support for loading property attributes based on environments and/or server contexts. Many projects work around this by creating custom ant builds. With Configleon you can build one war file that can be deployed to every location.

Configleon really shines is in it's ability to cascade the property attributes. This allows the common attributes to be defined in a global file and then overridden at the environment and server context.

If we consider the development of a web application, it typically starts in a local environment. The application will then be deployed to various environments including dev, qa, test, and production. Within a given environment, you may be deploying the same application to different server contexts.

For example, say we are deploying the JMesa example web application to the test environment. But we also have two different versions of the application. One is deployed to mycompany.com/jmesa and the other is deployed to mycompany.com/jmesa2. In this example that same war file can use different properties based on both environment and context. In this example, the environment is test and the server context is jmesa and jmesa2.

Trying to deal with all the property attributes related to the various environments can be a nightmare. Worse yet is when you realize many of the attributes do not change between environments. Keeping the property configuration sane is what Configleon does, and it does it very well!

This application has been road tested for a couple years and I am very happy that it is now open sourced! To learn how to run Configleon for a web application read the WebPropertyConfigurer page. To learn how to run Configleon in a (non-web) application or with integration tests read the ApplicationPropertyConfigurer page. Then be sure to use the groups page if you have any questions or problems. Also, if you like or dislike using Configleon let us know that too. Feel free to drop me a quick message at jeff.johnston.mn@gmail.com if that works better for you.

1-7-2010 We just moved to Spring 3.0 today and have verified that Configleon works perfectly with the new @Value annotation. To use it you have to be sure to use the ${} syntax (the dollar sign in the front).

@Value("${imagePath}") String imagePath

3-10-2010 Configleon .8.4 has been released. You can now specify an override resource that will override every environment and server context. To enable this just set the 'configPropertiesOverride' JVM variable. This is very useful if you want to quickly modify some settings without having to package a new war file.

-DconfigPropertiesOverride=file:///home/jjohnston/test.properties

Note: hopefully the lack of new releases does not concern people. Configleon was in use for a couple years before open sourcing so there was not really much to improve upon. Going forward I will keep Configleon up-to-date with Spring releases, but I do not anticipate a need for many new releases.

In Other News...

Here are a few other frameworks and tools that I have developed.

JMesa

• A dynamic HTML table that makes working with tabular data in your web application a breeze.

Alertleon

• An alert system that is tightly integrated with Configleon and offers an advanced way to trigger email events in your application.

OpenORM

• An ORM framework that is unique in that it fits right in the middle of other frameworks that either try to do too much, or too little.

CodeSlayer

• A source code editor that boasts a clean interface but powerful features. It is written in C using the GTK+ toolkit.