Application Properties Organized and Stored in central location. That's main purpose of APropOS. This simple web application allows developers to put their application/build/i18n/... properties in a single place and access them from wherever they like. Here is what it looks like:
APropOS started as a proof of concept. Basically it tried to solve the annoying problem of keeping up-to-date with adding and removing properties as well as changing their values during the development of one quite big project.
The above mentioned project uses Apache Ant for building versions on many different machines (developers', staging, production). There is a <project-name>.properties file per machine/user containing instance specific configuration (things like database connection strings, local path, LDAP settings, ...). Some of this properties are often the same for a given team or set of instances but other may be unique! Some affect the build process and, for example, add modules, other are environment or purpose specific.
With over 350 properties (at the time of writing) and a few teams working on different parts of the same project at the same time, it is really hard to know what properties one needs to set with what values.
The idea was to organize properties in a tree structure, place it in a central location and modify the build to get it form there instead if using local files. This brings the power of inheritance and allows instances to overwrite only a small subset of properties. This way modifying a property in a parent node will be automatically picked by all child nodes (as long as they do not overwrite it).