Best practice for specifying end points in individual Orbeon Forms deployed in multiple environments

We are currently using Orbeon Forms version 4.1.0.201304182144-PE. We have several separate Orbeon Form environments: Local Development, Development Servers, Test Servers and Production Servers. Our Orbeon Forms are initially created in Development and when approved we eventually migrate them onto Production. In order to keep the environments isolated and perform testing each environment has its own HTTP services.

We don’t want to modify HTTP service end points in each individual form so we are looking for best practice in order for the form to wire itself to the correct end point. Is the best approach for ourselves to simply define values in Orbeon Properties files on each Orbeon Installation?

For example properties file:
Server-name = server.name
Server-port = 8080

Individual forms would then perform an XPath expression to produce a service end point: server-name + server-port + service-name. This option seems fine however for some services that we consume (although not all services) other teams use different host headers (devl extension for development services etc.) for each environment. Could we use a similar approach to how Orbeon has wild cards for certain properties? So we could do something along the lines all apps and forms have this end point however specific apps or specific apps and forms have this end point.

We determined that prod and dev modes could do the same thing however we tend to use just one Orbeon properties file per installation so we don’t really use the modes.

Many thanks
Graham