在tomcat Webapp中引用可变的外部Web服务URL

Question

I have a jax-rs webapp deployed on tomcat. The webapp references another external webservice, whose url may change due to version increment and is different on the dev environment than in production.

Now I tried different approaches to reference the current external service url but neither seems good enough:

A) I can have variables in a database table, which is different for dev/ production. On version increment, I'd need to update the urls. This works ok, but I'd rather like the variables closer with the application, if possible.

B) I can store the variables in context xml. But then I have application-specific parameters in it, which I would like to avoid. Even more, i need to restart the application or even the tomcat instance for changes to take effect. I'd like to avoid that in the production environment.

C) I can place the variables in web.xml. Then I have to update the application with a version increment of the external webservice. I could handle this if I only link to major versions of the external webservice, where endpoints may change, so updates would be seldom. But worse is, I will not have different values for dev and production, as web.xml comes with the application.

Any other ideas or suggestions, how to come around this?

Answer 1

Ok, I ended up with a properties file now, which I did not pack with the application but which resides on the server. So I can have different ones for development and production, where I reference the current version of an external webservice. The properties filename comes from context.xml.