The main problem which this library solves is a plain old boilerplate code which is common when we talk about configuration parsing.
This library is developed as a part of the spark-sql-bootstrap.core and kafka-streaming-bootstrap.core libraries and is later extracted into a separate project. The reason for that is it could be used when developing any application or program besides these.
The library key features are:
– Creating self-documented and easy-to-use command-line interface
– Parsing configurations from command line arguments
– Parsing configurations from a file of different formats
– Performing string interpolation of environment variables using placeholders
There are three main APIs:
1. ICommandLine – used for creating a CLI and parsing configuration from command line arguments. By default, configuration-utils use DefaultCliAdapter as an implementation of the ICommandLine interface. The DefaultCliAdapter is based on the widely used Commons CLI library.
2. IParser – used for parsing configuration from files of arbitrary format. The default implementation of the IParser interface is JsonConfigurationParser which relies on the Jackson serialization library.
3. IStringInterpolator – used for interpolating environment variables in the key-value format into the raw configuration files. The default interpolation algorithm is based on variables surrounded by the key prefixes and suffixes. Also, some variable(s) can have a default value which is considered if the environment variable hasn’t been set.
There is also a utility API called ConfigurationContext which acts as a unified API (facade) that reads from the configuration files, interpolates the environment variables and overrides fields with command line arguments.
