Best practice for storing global data in J2EE App using Hibernate

I'm looking for the best solution to store Java EE application's global data using Hibernate. It will consist of key value pairs. Example:

projectStarted = "10-11-11"
developerNumber = 3
teamLeader = "John"

As you see, all of this entries have different types.

For now I see two options:

1) Create GlobalData entity. Each field of it will be represented as unique column in the table and will contain unique setting. This way I have no problems with type casting, but I would like to avoid it in case where there will be big amount of settings.

2) Create Setting entity. Each of it will contain two fields: key(Primary key) and value and will be represented as unique record in the table. This is preferable solution, but It's seems to me that I will get a lot of type casting, because settings can be any type.

So basically, I'm looking for the way to implement second solution without getting a lot of troubles from different types. Can anybody help me?

Thanks.

Edit 1.

Yea开发者_运维问答h, thanks Christian. Just got similar idea.

What if I will have Settings entity, which will be like:

@Entity
@Table(name = "settings")
public class Setting {

    @Column
    private String key;
    @Column
    private String value;
    @Column
    private String converterClassFullName; //example by.lugovsky.MyConverter

    //Getters, setters
}

And GlobalData class.

public class GlobalData {
    private Date projectStarted;

    private int developerNumber;

    private String teamLeader;

    Set<Setting> settings;

    //Getters and setters for all, except settings.

}

So basically my idea is to convert Setting entity before persisting/updating/ etc. I can do this in my DAO, but I was wondering, if I could annotate GlobalData class with @Entity annotation as well without creating new table. This way I can set OneToMany annotation to Setting's set and Perform conversions in the internal @PrePersist etc. methods.

Will Hibernate allow me to do this?

Thanks again

---

You could store a Converter-Class into the db and the let it run through the given converter for a property before using the value. JSF offers Converter API:

public interface Converter{
    public Object getAsObject(FacesContext fc, UIComponent component, String value) throws ConverterException;

    public String getAsString(FacesContext fc, UIComponent component, Object obj) throws ConverterException;
}

If you have a schema with

name: String

value: String

converter: Class

then you could do something like this:

PropertyEntry pe = // Get from OR-Mapper
Converter c = (Converter) pe.getConverter().newInstance();
Object o = c.getAsObject(null, null, pe.getValue());
// use the object o instead of value

For even more coolness you could also define a field in the class which will not be persisted which you could use to hold the converted value within the object.