About a week ago (who has time to keep up with this stuff?) Ben Nadel wrote an excellent article about Setting custom Application.cfc settings based on the server environment, which I think is great supplemental reading to my article about Setting environment-specific Application.cfm settings. As Ben points out, the important distinction is that his internal function is only setting up the Application.cfc settings, not Application variables; while the goal of my post was to aid in determining which values to set for your Application variables. We differ on the fact that he thinks you should avoid having configuration files outside of the web root, while I think they are just fine as long as you code appropriately. In my example, if the file is not found, or the contents don't match any of the expected contents, then we assume we are in production. This may cause some frustration while configuring new development, test, QA, or staging environments; if you forget that the file has to exist and have appropriate contents, but ensures that unless someone deliberately sets a non-production value in the config file, production will always be right.