Managing Spring configurations across platforms spring, additional, difference, customer, managing

amy

Hello,

I have based a few Java SE RMI client/server applications on the spring framework.
As these applications approach release time, I am facing the problem of managing the difference of configurations between my platforms. I have at least 3 of them:
- the developper platform (assuming all of them use the same settings, quot;localhostquot;, file path,...)
- an internal integration platform
- the customer's production platform

(quot;at leastquot;, because additional platforms may be: developpers may have differing settings, validation platform setup by the customer,... but they seem closely derived from one of the main 3).

The differences between these platforms are:
- properties of quot;external systemsquot;: host, port, login/pwd, folder,...)
- different implementations of beans: for example on the developper platform we have a a StubbedBillingService to stub out the BillingService that is developped by a contractor; on the integration platform we have a FakeSecurityService, a fake implementation of the customer's authamp;auditing service, which enables us to inject behaviors (errors, events,...) in a programmatic way without needing to use the actual security servce (and, harder yet, to creeate erros and events with the actual service).
- different configuration files (not Spring files)

My naive assumption was that a PropertiesPlaceholderConfiguration would be enough, but that fails:
- either a common property file is retrieved from the CMS, and at some point it will require manual edition to tailor it for the platform.
- or each platform has its own version of the property file, which inccurs a lot of redundancy and syncing work (new property added to config for platform 1 and forgotten on config for platform 2 -gt; yuck!)
- differences are not reducible to just values of properties: the FakeSecurityService, for example, has some properties that the real service doesn't have, and vice-versa. I really need different lt;bean ...gt; sections for those two.

I found an article (pub/a/onjava/2...iguration.html) which suggests using lt;import ... /gt; tags to import parts of the spring-beans.xml file form a host-specific spring-beans-platform.xml, and even suggest a mechanism where the import file is named after the host's name, but I can't tell the hostnames in advance, especially for the customer's platforms.

My general question is: what are your suggestions to manage (development, CMS and deployment) such platform differences?

I have started thinking of a possible solution if I had a way to import the specific definitions from a file whose name is built using a system property such as -Dplatform.id=production (I think I can require editing of the launch script by the platform admin, ).
I don't know which Spring API to use to make Spring load a generic spring-beans.xml and import a variable spring-beans-lt;platformgt;.xml.
Can you help me in this direction too?

Thanks in advance.
   J.

How about maintaining different context xml files for each configurations. You can then control which gets loaded by a property file that just contains the path to your config. You can use ClassPathXmlApplicationContext for this.

PropertiesPlaceholderConfiguration has always worked for us.  you can try using the quot;locationsquot; property to pick up your specific overrides for each configurations.