Dev vs. Prod: Proper Project Structure

Question

I'm just learning the "proper" way of structuring projects and would like to know the convention for managing items like Log4j paths, Connection URLs for Tomcat, etc.
How do you NOT have to go and change everything by hand. Is there some way to flip a bit (change a flag. etc) in a "one-place-to-move-to-Prod" type of way.
Thanks in advance for any insight.

Answer 1

There are a couple of ways:
Pass the 'run-level' or 'environment' you are in to Tomcat (via a -D command switch) and then inspect the run-level/environ via ServletContext. Alternatively, you can have separate startup shell scripts for each environment. Either way, you are simply trying to pass the environment to the Servlet's init() method.
Create a properties/configuration file. Organize your settings by run-level (say, using elements in a XML configuration file or a prefix if using a standard properties file). Then, read-in the settings appropriate to a given run-level. The above can be made a lot easier if you use something like Jakarta Commons Configuration.- Saish