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POApplication configuration files
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copied!<p>OK, so I don't want to start a holy-war here, but we're in the process of trying to consolidate the way we handle our application configuration files and we're struggling to make a decision on the best approach to take. At the moment, every application we distribute is using it's own ad-hoc configuration files, whether it's property files (ini style), XML or JSON (internal use only at the moment!).</p> <p>Most of our code is Java at the moment, so we've been looking at <a href="http://commons.apache.org/configuration/" rel="noreferrer">Apache Commons Config</a>, but we've found it to be quite verbose. We've also looked at <a href="http://xmlbeans.apache.org/" rel="noreferrer">XMLBeans</a>, but it seems like a lot of faffing around. I also feel as though I'm being pushed towards XML as a format, but my clients and colleagues are apprehensive about trying something else. I can understand it from the client's perspective, everybody's heard of XML, but at the end of the day, shouldn't be using the right tool for the job?</p> <p>What formats and libraries are people using in production systems these days, is anyone else trying to avoid the <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001114.html" rel="noreferrer">angle bracket tax</a>?</p> <p><strong><em>Edit:</strong> really needs to be a cross platform solution: Linux, Windows, Solaris etc. and the choice of library used to interface with configuration files is just as important as the choice of format.</em></p>

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