Properties - Best Practices : How to

There are basically two kinds of properties;

1. Properties that belong to the environment - for example the database you connect to when you are running the application in Dev. as opposed to the database you connect to when you are running in Prod.
2. Properties that crosscut environments - for example how you want to log or the resource bundle you are using for messages.

That said you may want to override properties in certain environments - for instance you may want to use a different message bundle in Prod w/o recompiling or restarting the application:

1. There needs to be a hierarchical and consistent way to override properties.
2. Properties need to be configurable at runtime.

These are some of the basic premises used to arrive at the current practice of how properties are implemented.