When I develop some application, I usually add a logging functionality to it. I find logging useful, especially for
maintaining the application.
Some bugs cannot be caught with tests and you often neither detect them when using
the application. But then, once you release it and a user runs your application, at some point he will for sure get a
stacktrace as usual :). A log-file, which keeps track of the latest events and/or failures, is then extremely useful to
quickly detect the problem. Initially I started to use
log4j, which
is a very nice library with a huge amount of functionalities (I didn't for sure find all of them :D ). However I then
started to develop my own logger, since I think that if you have your home-made projects, you don't really want to
write complicated configuration-files and that stuff. Just load the library and start logging...
So I developed
SimpleLog. As the name says, it is a very basic, simple logging
utility for Java. My decision was to write all log-entries to an XML file, for which reason
SimpleLog
also needs to have the JDom library in the build-path of your project. I've chosen that, because this guarantees
flexibility. In this way one could also write its own application that does some analysis stuff upon the created
xml-log-files, which could be interesting (i.e. failure distribution over classes; failure frequency, etc...).
I've
uploaded everything to
this location. Before installing please read
the
Wiki pages, where I gave an example of how to use
SimpleLog. If you then decide to use it, it would be nice if you
report issues to me such that I can improve it.
Here
you can find also a sample-log file.
Questions? Thoughts? Hit me up
on Twitter
