HOCON and Config
Nov. 2nd, 2012 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurA little tidbit for the programmers: just came across the Typesafe Config Library, a very nice little open-source project that provides a general-purpose JVM configuration stack. (Entirely Java-based, so that you don't need Scala in order to use it.) Given that every startup I have ever worked at has wound up wasting time building a better config system (since most of the traditional options suck), this is a fine benefit -- the Typesafe stack appears to provide all of the major features that I always have to reimplement (like layering).
Particularly interesting is the HOCON ("Human-Optimized Config Object Notation") config language. It's a very useful looking dialect of JSON -- it basically starts with JSON, but relaxes many of the syntactic rules so that it winds up much easier to write and maintain by hand. It's still a reasonably rich data-representation language (indeed, more powerful than JSON itself), but by simplifying the annoying requirements like comma placement, it gets rid of most of the usual gotchas.
Pretty, simple and useful -- I'd bet that this language will quickly escape its parent project...
Particularly interesting is the HOCON ("Human-Optimized Config Object Notation") config language. It's a very useful looking dialect of JSON -- it basically starts with JSON, but relaxes many of the syntactic rules so that it winds up much easier to write and maintain by hand. It's still a reasonably rich data-representation language (indeed, more powerful than JSON itself), but by simplifying the annoying requirements like comma placement, it gets rid of most of the usual gotchas.
Pretty, simple and useful -- I'd bet that this language will quickly escape its parent project...