How to differentiate between test and production properties in an application?

What you want to avoid is having the config file inside the EAR, the problem with this is that you need different EAR's for different environments, and also, changing the config file requires a rebuild.

Rather deploy the same EAR to every server but configure each server with a different URL resource. iow, add a JNDI URL resource to all the servers you deploy to that point to the config file for that resource. If you have read only SVN access to your repo then create the config files on the svn repo, or any repo you can access via a URL. The cool thing here is that all your configuration is centralized and thus managing them is easy.

What I've done (by customizing with spring) is make sure that JNDI URL resource optional. So, if it's there, the app will use it, if not, it won't. The app starts up whether it's there or not. That way, even when running with no JNDI resource available, the app still works (development environment for example).

You deploy an EAR? Then put the properties needed in JNDI.