Spring out of the box provides little support for loading property attributes based on environments and/or server contexts. Many projects work around this by creating custom ant builds. With Configleon you can build one war file that can be deployed to every location.

Configleon really shines is in it's ability to cascade the property attributes. This allows the common attributes to be defined in a global file and then overridden at the environment and server context.

If we consider the development of a web application, it typically starts in a local environment. The application will then be deployed to various environments including dev, qa, test, and production. Within a given environment, you may be deploying the same application to different server contexts.

For example, say we are deploying the JMesa example web application to the test environment. But we also have two different versions of the application. One is deployed to mycompany.com/jmesa and the other is deployed to mycompany.com/jmesa2. In this example that same war file can use different properties based on both environment and context. In this example, the environment is test and the server context is jmesa and jmesa2.