All that this means is that you need a way to manage the configuration in a human-readable form. There's no reason not to have tools that allow you to read and write the configuration through XML files (cf. Websphere's xmlconfig tools) while storing the configuration data in other forms. This also has the benefit of making it easy to take a snapshot of some or all of the configuration of an application so that you can revert to it at a later stage - something which a pure JNDI or similar implementation of configuration wouldn't appear to easily allow.
As with a few of the other discussions taking place on here, it's important to remember that just because it's nice to access it as XML doesn't mean that this has to be the underlying structure. Adrian -----Original Message----- From: Pranni [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 09 August 2003 12:28 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: One True Way (TM) of handling configuration files > > Alex Blewitt wrote: > >>> From an administrator's PoV, it would be nicer if all > >>> configuration could be done via an admin console, and for the > >>> repository to be stored in a not-necessarily-human-readable form > >>> which was updated as the config > >>> was changed via the admin console (e.g. Web app) > > > I think this makes an excellent point: > o GUI tools are better for administrators > o Developers like files Its not that developers like files, sometimes, for developers, files are the only way to change the configuration. In my company we have to deploy and test our application on a remote weblogic server, for which we have only a secure shell access(due to firewall reasons) . We do have the luxury of accessing configuration thru the admin console and modifying the config.xml is the only way we can change the server's configuration. So providing the configurations in a human-readable form would definitly needed in similar situations and a normal (xml?) text file will be a better option for that. -Prakash
