Configuration using Confort

Confort is a custom-written configuration library designed to unify different configuration formats into one abstract representation for Java applications.
At the moment, the library supports only JSON but other formats can be easily supported by adding an ANTLR v4 grammar and a visitor.
The project is open source too! Check it out!

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Confort now has a wiki!

Visit https://github.com/MarkL4YG/confort/wiki for the official library wiki.

The node structure

Confort is currently designed for tree-like configuration formats and builds its internal structure around that:

• A configuration has got a single root node (IConfigNode).
• A configuration node can one be of the following types:
  • virtual: The configuration node does not hold any value (transitively)
  • primitive: The configuration node holds one of the following types:
    • Integer, Float, Double, String or Boolean
  • list: The configuration node contains a list of other configuration nodes
  • map: The configuration node contains a String->IConfigNode mapping
• The classes that use the configuration are not supposed to be aware of the configuration format. It is completely hidden away from them.

Source abstraction

Confort allows the source of a configuration to be hidden too. For that, implementations of IConfig are used. (The JeakBot framework currently only uses the FileConfig implementation.)

Instances of that interface offer #load and #save methods to load and safe the state.
They also hold the currently loaded root configuration node.

Full example

Here's a full example of a plugin loading and saving a configuration using an IConfig representation:

Java

package de.fearnixx.jeak;

import de.fearnixx.jeak.reflect.Config;
import de.fearnixx.jeak.reflect.Inject;
import de.fearnixx.jeak.reflect.JeakBotPlugin;

@JeakBotPlugin(id = "sometestplugin")
public class TestPlugin {
  
  @Inject
  @Config(id = "testConfiguration")
  private IConfig configurationRepresentation;
  
  private IConfigNode configRoot;
  
  private void loadConfiguration() {
    try {
      configurationRepresentation.load();
      configRoot = configurationRepresentation.getRoot();
    } catch (ParseException | IOException e) {
      // A fatal error has occurred!
    }
  }
  
  private void saveConfiguration() {
    try {
      configurationRepresentation.save();
    } catch (IOException e) {
      // A fatal error has occurred!
    }
  }
  
  public void useConfiguration() {
    loadConfiguration();
    System.out.println(configRoot.getNode("some-string").asString());
    saveConfiguration();
  }
}

It is very clear that the plugin does not care where the configuration actually comes from and what format is used.

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Note

For more information on how to use IConfigNode, please consult its JavaDoc.
The confort project currently does not have an online documentation.

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Additional Node

You may take a look at the Configurable convenience class and check if extending this class is sufficient for your needs.