Strategies for dealing with inflexible 3rd party libraries

Question

I need help controlling the behavior of a couple of 3rd party libraries I am required to use in my application:

• DBLib, which is required for database access
• PropsLib, which is required by DBLib for configuration

DBLib makes a lot of static-method calls to PropsLib to acquire configuration settings. For example: String dbHost = PropsLib.getString("dbHost"). PropsLib uses non-standard .properties files that is reads from the filesystem. (non-standard meaning they have a quirky placeholder syntax that doesn't match any of our other .properties files) Also, the method for externalizing (overriding) those files per-environment is strange and clunky.

Are there any design strategies I could use that would allow me to use my existing Spring-based configuration mechanisms here? Or is my only option to write my own implementation of the PropsLib library?

Answer 1

If PropsLib is as short and easy as you described, I would recommend you to reimplement it in your own code to cheat DBLib and retrieve your spring-based configuration, instead using the properties file you hate :)

Of course, if PropsLib is in a .jar you would need to remove it from that archive before. You could also include your own version inside the .jar but this is not mandatory.