Using JSON to configure your scripts

The target of this recipe is to show how to use JSON as a format for configuring a Groovy application.

The requirements for a configuration file format are:

• Simple

• Human-readable

• Cross-platform

• Multi-language support

• Unicode support

JSON fully satisfies the above requirements, thus making a great candidate for configuring an application.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we work on a fictional application that maintains a connection to multiple databases. Each database has a number of parameters to configure such as host, port, credentials, and connection pool initial size.

The following is a sample JSON based configuration file for our application:

{
  "configuration":{
    "database":[
      {
        "name":"database1",
        "host":"10.20.30.40",
        "port":"4930",
        "user":"user-alpha",
        "password":"secret",
        "pool-initial-size":"10",
        "pool-max-size":"10"
      },
      {
        "name":"database2",
        "host":"192.168.10...