How do you manage embedded configuration files and libraries in java webapps?

Question

I'm currently working on a j2ee project that's been in beta for a while now. Right now we're just hammering out some of the issues with the deployment process. Specifically, there are a number of files embedded in the war (some xml-files and .properties) that need different versions deploying depending on whether you are in a dev, testing or production environment. Stuff like loglevels, connection pools, etc.

So I was wondering how developers here structure their process for deploying webapps. Do you offload as much configuration as you can to the application server? Do you replace the settings files programmatically before deploying? Pick a version during build process? Manually edit the wars?

Also how far do you go in providing dependencies through the application servers' static libraries and how much do you put in the war themselves? All this just to get some ideas of what the common (or perhaps best) practice is at the moment.

Answer 1

I think that if the properties are machine/deployment specific, then they belong on the machine. If I'm going to wrap things up in a war, it should be drop-innable, which means nothing that's specific to the machine it's running on. This idea will break if the war has machine dependent properties in it.

What I like to do is build a project with a properties.example file, each machine has a .properties that lives somewhere the war can access it.

An alternative way would be to have ant tasks, e.g. for dev-war, stage-war, prod-war and have the sets of properties part of the project, baked in in the war-build. I don't like this as much because you're going to end up having things like file locations on an individual server as part of your project build.

Answer 2

I put all configuration in the database. The container (Tomcat, WebSphere, etc) gives me access to the initial database connection and from then on, everything comes out of the database. This allows for multiple environments, clustering, and dynamic changes without downtime (or at least without a redeploy). Especially nice is being able to change the log level on the fly (although you'll need either an admin screen or a background refresher to pick up the changes). Obviously this only works for things that aren't required to get the app started, but generally, you can get to the database pretty quickly after startup.

Answer 3

I usually make two properties files:

• one for app specifics (messages, internal "magic" words) embedded in the app,
• the other for environment specifics (db access, log levels & paths...) exposed on each server's classpath and "sticked" (not delivered with my app). Usually I "mavenise" or "anttise" these one to put specific values, depending on the target env.
• Cool guys use JMX to maintain their app conf (conf can be modified in realtime, without redeploying), but it's too complex for my needs.

Server's (static ?) libraries: I strongly discourage server library use in my apps as it adds dependency to the server:

1. IMO, my app must be "self-packaged": dropping my war, and that's all. I have seen wars with 20 Mbs of jars in it, and that's not disturbing for me.
2. A common best-practice is to limit your external dependencies to what is offered by the J2EE dogma: the J2EE API (use of Servlets, Ejbs, Jndi, JMX, JMS...). Your app has to be "server agnostic".
3. Putting dependencies in your app (war, ear, wathever) is self-documenting: you know what libraries your app depends on. With server libs, you have to clearly document these dependencies as they are less obvious (and soon your developers will forget this little magic).
4. If you upgrade your appserver, chances that the server lib you depends on will also change. AppServer editors are not supposed to maintain compatibility on their internal libs from version to version (and most of the time, they don't).
5. If you use a widely-used lib embedded in your appServer (jakarta commons logging, aka jcl, comes to mind) and want to ugrade it's version to get the latest features, you take the huge risk that your appServer will not support it.
6. If you relies on a static server object (in a static field of a server class, e.g. a Map or a log), you'll have to reboot your appserver to clean this object. You loose the ability to hot-redeploy your app (old server object will still exists between redeployments). Using appServer-wide objects (other than those defined by J2EE) can lead to subtle bugs, especially if this object is shared between multiple apps. That's why I strongly discourage the use of objects which resides in a static field of an appServer lib.

If you absolutely need "this object in this appserver's jar", try to copy the jar in your app, hoping there's no dependency on other server's jar, and checking your app's classloading policy (I take the habit to put a "parent last" classloading policy on all my apps: I'm sure I won't be "polluted" by server's jars - but I don't know if it is a "best practice").

Answer 4

I work in an environment where a separate server team performs the configuration of the QA and Production servers for our applications. Each application is generally deployed on two servers in QA and three servers in Production. My dev team has discovered that it is best to minimize the amount of configuration required on the server by putting as much configuration as possible in the war (or ear). This makes server configuration easier and also minimizes the chance that the server team will incorrectly configure the server.

We don't have machine-specific configuration, but we do have environment-specific configuration (Dev, QA, and Production). We have configuration files stored in the war file that are named by environment (ex. dev.properties, qa.properties, prod.properties). We put a -D property on the server VM's java command line to specify the environment (ex. java -Dapp.env=prod ...). The application can look for the app.env system property and use it to determine the name of the properties file to use.

I suppose if you have a small number of machine-specific properties then you could specify them as -D properties as well. Commons Configuration provides an easy way to combine properties files with system properties.

We configure connection pools on the server. We name the connection pool the same for every environment and simply point the servers that are assigned to each environment to the appropriate database. The application only has to know the one connection pool name.

Answer 5

wrt configuration files, I think Steve's answer is the best one so far. I would add the suggestion of making the external files relative to the installation path of the war file - that way you can have multiple installations of the war in the one server with different configurations.

e.g. If my dev.war gets unpacked into /opt/tomcat/webapps/dev, then I would use ServletContext.getRealPath to find the base folder and war folder name, so then the configuration files would live in ../../config/dev relative to the war, or /opt/tomcat/config/dev for absolute.

I also agree with Bill about putting as little as possible in these external configuration files. Using the database or JMX depending on your environment to store as much as it makes sense to. Apache Commons Configuration has a nice object for handling configurations backed by a database table.

Regarding libraries, I agree with unknown to have all the libs in the WEB-INF/lib folder in the war file (self-packaged). The advantage is that each installation of the application is autonomous, and you may have different builds of the war using different versions of the libraries concurrently.

The disadvantage is that it will use more memory as each web application will have its own copy of the classes, loaded by its own class loader.

If this poses a real concern, then you could put the jars in the common library folder for your servlet container ($CATALINA_HOME/lib for tomcat). All installations of your web application running on the same server have to use the same versions of the libraries though. (Actually, that's not strictly true as you could put overriding versions in the individual WEB-INF/lib folder if necessary, but that's getting pretty messy to maintain.)

I would build an automated installer for the common libraries in this case, using InstallShield or NSIS or equivalent for your operating system. Something that can make it easy to tell if you have the most up to date set of libraries, and upgrade, downgrade, etc.