I've been working on the UtilProperties class to clean up some of the code, improving the cache
handling algorithm, improve support for i18n, and add support for the new XML properties file format.
I believe we could really improve the performance of OFBiz if we cached FastMap instances instead of
java.util.Properties instances. That would require a slight change in the UtilProperties API -
UtilProperties.getProperties(...) would return a Map instance instead of a Properties instance.
Doing so wouldn't have a large impact on the existing code base - there are only a handful of places
where UtilProperties.getProperties(...) is called. The problem would be legacy installations -
custom code that calls UtilProperties.getProperties(...) would break.
Should I change the existing method signature, or add the new methods and
deprecate the old ones?
-Adrian
