I've spent some time working on enhancements to the Chainsaw UI and I thought I'd step back and see what people think. Here's what I've implemented so far:
If there are any suggestions for improvement/changes/duplication of effort in what you see here, please let me know.
1: LoggingEvents can now be received from a UDPAppender and XMLLayout (support for multicast) via UDPReceiver. Just start log4j and help your neighbor debug without leaving your desk (as long as you're on the same subnet).
2: UDPAppender looks for an "APP" system property. If found, the name/value pair is added to the loggingevent properties - along with the machine name (or ip address if not resolvable) (used to uniquely identify each VM running on a machine in Chainsaw).
3: Tabbed pane support - a tabbed pane for each unique machinename/app combination. I thought about allowing the user to pick which fields are used to build the unique tabbed panes, but I'm not sure how useful it would be. I could see using the NDC or MDC on separate tabbed panes in some situations.
4: Jakarta RegExp used to build display and colorizing filters. The DisplayFilter associates columns with regular expressions. If the value in that column passes the regexp, then the row is added to the display. ColorFilters work the same way except they map columns and regular expressions to a Color. For example, colorFilter.addFilter("Level", "WARN|INFO", Color.RED) will do the obvious. If a DisplayFilter exists, the row must pass at least one filter to be displayed. If there are no display filters, all rows pass.
5: Ascending/descending column sort with up/down icons - I have gained approval from Claude Duguay to place his JTable sorting code (see http://www.fawcette.com/javapro/2002_08/magazine/columns/visualcomponents/) under the Apache License for use in Log4j. He would like recognition somewhere and a note in the code saying this code has been placed under the Apache license with his explicit permission. Finally, great JSortTable functionality and cool up/down arrows!
6: Handy multi-line tooltip text - see Logger/Msg/Level/Exception information as you move the mouse over the table's rows - no more scrolling to the right to read the exception!
7: A right mouse button popup menu with 'clear log' (per tabbed pane) and toggle on/off of the multi-line tooltip (it is a little slower to update the tooltip over each row).
8. Updated log4j.dtd and LoggingEvent to support properties/mdc.
I've made the changes with JDK1.4 and I think I've taken advantage of some of JDK1.4's functionality - but making it work on 1.3 shouldn't be difficult.
I haven't looked at Log4J 1.3's receivers yet but hopefully my UDPReceiver will fit nicely.
Still to do: 1. Save all settings to property file, including defined color/display filters, window position, column widths/maybe column order
Scott,
I've already implemented some property saving (window position/size, column widths/order, etc.). Oliver Burn has my diffs and will be proxying the changes into CVS in a few days. Although it appears there may be some merging to do.
Ray
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