getResourceAsStream - properties files

[Java Poop]

Hey guys-   I'm trying to figure out way to separate my initialization parameters from my application.war file. Because certain things are different between dev, qa and live machines (such as database hostname, username, password, etcs), I rather not put these values in the web.xml file. (The web.xml would be stuck in the application.war file and I don't want the deployment people to unjar it in a deployment setting to change the values of web.xml).   So, I'm looking at trying to setup my own properties file that a singleton class would read in my web application and set as global variables for all my servlets/jsps. However, I'm having trouble writing the code to open up the properties file. I'd like to put the properties file in %TOMCAT_HOME%/settings directory (I made this directory up and added it to the classpath in my tomcat.bat file).   From some previous posts on this list, I'm trying :   InputStream stream = this.getClass().getResourceAsStream("testApp.properties"); But it fails. If I use a File stream and point right at the file, it does load. Just as a test, I tried copying this file to the same location where the class was, as well as myapplication/WEB-INF/classes and myapplication/WEB-INF/lib, and still could not get the file loaded.   What would be the proper way to have this loaded (preferably in the settings directory since I can't rely on my war file being unjar'd by future tomcats).   BTW- I'm using Tomcat 3.2.1 in Standalone, Win2K, JDK1.3.   Thanks in advance, JP