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Smartly load your properties

Strive for disk location-independent code nirvana

By Vladimir Roubtsov, JavaWorld.com, 08/08/03

Page 3 of 3

The shorter loadProperties() convenience method decides which classloader to use for loading the resource. The solution shown is reasonable but not perfect; you might consider using techniques described in "Find a Way Out of the ClassLoader Maze" instead.

Note that two conditional compilation constants control loadProperties() behavior, and you can tune them to suit your tastes:

• THROW_ON_LOAD_FAILURE selects whether loadProperties() throws an exception or merely returns null when it can't find the resource
• LOAD_AS_RESOURCE_BUNDLE selects whether the resource is searched as a resource bundle or as a generic classpath resource

Setting LOAD_AS_RESOURCE_BUNDLE to true isn't advantageous unless you want to benefit from localization support built into java.util.ResourceBundle. Also, Java internally caches resource bundles, so you can avoid repeated disk file reads for the same resource name.

More things to come

I intentionally omitted an interesting classpath resource loading method, ClassLoader.getResources(). Despite its infrequent use, ClassLoader.getResources() allows for some very intriguing options in designing highly customizable and easily configurable applications.

I didn't discuss ClassLoader.getResources() in this article because it's worthy of a dedicated article. As it happens, this method goes hand in hand with the remaining way to acquire resources: java.net.URLs. You can use these as even more general-purpose resource descriptors than classpath resource name strings. Look for more details in the next Java Q&A installment.

About the author

Read more about Core Java in JavaWorld's Core Java section.