Architecture

The configuration handling consists of a singleton class as central information storage like a registry. On access you will get references to the data.

The most things are done while starting up your application (app). You will load the config module and setup the config module with the file storage and validation schema, first. When you call the init() method it will initialize everything. This is the heaviest process because it will search for the configuration files, load them, parse them and validate the resulting structure with the schema given in the setup.

After that step the config module keeps the ready to use registry. If you query it using the get() method it will do no less than retrieve the data on the defined path. So it’s very fast now.

A special behavior is the reloading of the configuration after the files changed. This can be triggered using the reload() method which will run the whole process from the initializing again and on the end replaces the current configuration with the new one. You can do this in the asynchronously in the background. To get your application parts be notified then to update the possible changed data you can use the event listener interface.