Kunal Sharma

Duplicating configuration file is certainly a maitainance issue for our product and is not acceptable. Here is my thought to address this issue in a clustered environment. It may not make sense but I'll just share it here and see if that helps you in coming up with some better ideas.
Here is a little background within context:
1. My application has Configuration class that reads and caches configuration information. It provides high level intereface to access parsed configuration information.
2. The application also has a singleton class i.e. ApplicationManager which is responsible for instantiating Configuration class and holds a reference to the object for the duration of the application. Other modules access configuration information through the ApplicationManager interface.
3. In clustered environment, each node will have it's own instance of ApplicationManager and will have a copy of Configuration class.
I am trying that ApplicationManager on one node instantiates the Configuration class and stores it in the JNDI. ApplicationManager on other nodes will get reference to the Configuration object from the JNDI.
Now the issues which I have with above approach:
1. How to pass configuration file PATH information to the ApplicationManager? Certainly don't want to duplicate information on each node.
2. How can I make only one node constructing Configuration object and then sharing it with other nodes?
If there anything like master-slave nodes in J2EE, how can i distinguish them programatically? That way ApplicationManager on master node will instantiate Configuration and others will get it from JNDI.
If there nothing like master-slave nodes in J2EE, then ApplicationManager on each node will check if Configuration object is available in JNDI or not before attemting constructing one. In this case, how to isolate ApplicationManager on multiple node from constructing Configuration object?
I am relatively new to J2EE, so please excuse my ignorance on the subject.
regards

Thanks Chris!
I don't know much about distributed deployment in J2EE, but how will this system property information will be shared among multiple server? Does application server duplicates it across multiple nodes or the information should be specified on each node separately, which might be an issue.
regards

I have a J2EE server application that has its own xml based configuration file. The location of the configuration file is specified during installation by our customers.
There is no issue in accessing this file as long as the the my application module knows the location of the file. Here is my questions:
Q. What is the best way to pass configuration PATH information to my application module (e.g. uisng JNDI, application server config file, system property files etc.)? Since the product is going to support multiple application servers in a distributed environment, a generic approach is required.
regards
Kunal