Introducing OWNER, a Tiny Framework for Java Properties Files.

I never liked to create “wrapper” classes for properties files. Do you know… those classes like:

public class MyAppConfig {
    private static Properties p = ...;

    public static String serverName() {
        return p.getProperty("server.name");
    }

    public static int serverPort() {
        return Integer.parseInt(p.getProperty("server.port"));
    }

    ....
}

There’s nothing really bad about those classes. Only that they don’t do actually anything useful; plus, you need to keep things in sync with the properties file associated.

So, I always preferred to directly use Properties.getProperty() and pass a config properties to objects:

   
public class MyBusinessClass {
    private final Properties conf;
    public MyBusinessClass(..., Properties conf) {
        this.conf = conf;
    }    

    public void doSomething() {
        String serverName = conf.getProperty("server.name");
        int serverPort = Integer.parseInt(conf.getProperty("server.port"));
    }
}

99% of the times, you need a configuration setting in a single point. So that’s good enough, and I don’t have to write (and keep in sync) a class that I can spare.

But… what about this?

public interface MyAppConfig extends Config {

    @DefaultValue("foobar.com")
    @Key("server.name");
    String serverName();

    @DefaultValue("80");
    @Key("server.port");
    int serverPort();
    ...
}

Add to this, a smart -annotation based- configuration loading:

@Sources({"file:~/.myapp.config", "file:/etc/myapp.config", "classpath:foo/bar/baz.properties"})
public interface MyAppConfig extends Config {
...

And a simple instantiation:

MyAppConfig conf = ConfigFactory.create(MyAppConfig.class);

And you have OWNER. A little configuration framework based on Java properties.

BSD license.
Credits to Google GWT, that does similar things with i18n.