Hi,

I have a Spring/JSP/Hibernate web app which needs to be implemented in
a few different countries, each country having slightly different
requirements.  The language issue is easy to resolve but I'm wondering
how best to implement the different properties, entity relationships
and business rules which are adopted by each country.

As an example, let's say that when a user enters a customer account
into the app, the new account is assigned to an account manager.  In
the UK the assignation is based upon customer type, in the US its
based upon the customer's postcode (zip code) and in Germany the
account is assigned manually by the user.

In addition, in the US we store the customer's email address while in
Germany and the UK we don't.  But in the UK we need to allow the user
to enter as many phone numbers for the customer as they wish, while
the US and Germany allow only one.

It's been suggested to me that we could have one big app with
conditional logic for each country ("if UK do this; if US do that; if
Germany do something else").  A nicer idea, to my mind, is to have a
"core" app from which the customised countries inherit as necessary.
But I'm not really a Java programmer and am likely to be talking
rubbish.

It strikes me that this must be a solved problem, and any advice would
be much appreciated.

Thanks
Wombat