In a software project, especially java, one would employ various third party libraries to ease and speed up development.
However, every library would likely have it's own configuration file or approach to configuration.
Let's look at a typical java project. A web based project would have a web configuration file (XML). It is highly likely to use logging, maybe configured with a property file. For sure there is a database connectivity, and since there is password involved, you might want to define it in the application server. And if you are using Spring, you might have a bunch more XML files to configure.
So that is like at least 3-4 files to configure.
Now let's say you are a very modular person. You like to have things configurable too. So you had a configuration file for the LDAP settings, one file for the security policies, one file for default email templates, one file for mail servers.
Now, imagine that a new developer comes along, and need to update the configuration of a bunch of things. The changes would be spread among various files.
Or imagine a fresh deployment, which require the configuration of a database connectivity, LDAP, email server. 3 files instead of one. Or maybe it is not a new server for production, but just a test server.
I was brought to the wordpress system. To configure a new copy of wordpress, all one need is to configure just one file. The file would contain all the settings. I did not look into it, but it woul also make sense for plugins to expose their settings in there too.
A conclusion I draw from this? Try to centralize an application configurations at a single location. Try to make it a facade for all the subsystems, even though they might be third party plugins, libraries, or systems. This helps in management of settings, and reduce learning curve for new developers or users.
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