My only concern is that people might be expecting a DSL to create the actual 
Appenders, Layouts, etc. where this will just be creating configuration Nodes. 
That said, I don’t have a problem with it. I am not sure that your second 
example is valid since you are declaring an appender without an appenders node. 
The first syntax looks more concise to me.

Ralph

> On May 3, 2019, at 10:08 AM, Matt Sicker <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I believe Ralph has brought up a feature request in the past, though I
> don't remember where. Anyways, Logback has a Groovy DSL [1] as an
> option to configure itself, and we could introduce a similar feature
> built on top of the existing ConfigurationBuilder code from the Java
> DSL in log4j-core. After seeing how easily Groovy integrates with Java
> to form DSLs in Jenkins [2] (more so in the web framework than in
> pipelines, but both are valid), I've been considering working on such
> a feature.
> 
> Let's take a random configuration sample from the manual [3]:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <Configuration status="WARN">
>  <Appenders>
>    <Console name="Console" target="SYSTEM_OUT">
>      <PatternLayout pattern="%d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} [%t] %-5level
> %logger{36} - %msg%n"/>
>    </Console>
>  </Appenders>
>  <Loggers>
>    <Logger name="com.foo.Bar" level="trace">
>      <AppenderRef ref="Console"/>
>    </Logger>
>    <Root level="error">
>      <AppenderRef ref="Console"/>
>    </Root>
>  </Loggers>
> </Configuration>
> 
> If I were to translate this to the equivalent Groovy DSL, here is one
> example of how that might look:
> 
> configuration(status: 'warn') {
>  appenders {
>    console(name: 'Console', target: 'SYSTEM_OUT') {
>      patternLayout(pattern: '%d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} [%t] %-5level
> %logger{36} - %msg%n')
>    }
>  }
>  loggers {
>    logger(name: 'com.foo.Bar', level: 'trace') {
>      appenderRef(ref: 'Console')
>    }
>    root(level: 'error') {
>      appenderRef(ref: 'Console')
>    }
>  }
> }
> 
> An alternative syntax would be to switch from using method parameters
> to properties of the closure. For example, that might look like:
> 
> configuration {
>  status = 'warn'
>  console {
>    name = 'Console'
>    target = 'SYSTEM_OUT'
>    patternLayout {
>      pattern = '%d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} [%t] %-5level %logger{36} - %msg%n'
>    }
>  }
>  // ...
> }
> 
> Are there any preferences on syntax? I don't think we can get super
> fancy with the DSL due to the underlying APIs (i.e., we can't provide
> much in the way of code completion AFAIK), but supporting a dynamic
> DSL like that is fairly easy with Groovy. This does open a question of
> configuration being scripted versus declarative since we'd be offering
> a full script engine technically in order to write your configuration.
> I do not expect this feature to offer a programmatic way of
> manipulating the underlying plugin objects (i.e., this would be for
> building a Configuration, not manipulating a running one); that might
> make more sense with a more standardized plugin API which is a
> wishlist item I have for 3.0.
> 
> [1]: https://logback.qos.ch/manual/groovy.html
> [2]: 
> https://github.com/stapler/stapler/blob/master/groovy/src/main/java/org/kohsuke/stapler/jelly/groovy/JellyBuilder.java
> [3]: https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/manual/configuration.html
> 
> -- 
> Matt Sicker <[email protected]>
> 


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