Hey All,
Chainsaw is getting big. What does everyone think about moving Chainsaw out into it's own CVS module and making it a 'client' of the log4j library?
In Eclipse one can make a Project have a dependency on another project, so that makes it nice from a developer point of view, and from an Ant point of view we can just have Chainsaw require to be built against specific log4j jars.
I have the following thoughts going through my mind at the moment that would require add ingseveral jars to the dependencies of Chainsaw, and it just might make everyones life easier if it were in a seperate module. I'm not too fussed either way, but thought I would float the idea in case people think it's a good idea.
Anyway, on to some ideas I've been having, comments appreciated:
* VFS[3] - Chainsaw could be _way_ more useful if JSch can be used with VFS - browse any VFS filestore, including SFTP, so one could access log files from a protected/remote store. Recently JSch moved from a LGPL license to BSD, so this should be ok to embed[2]
* Lucene[4] - Be able to index and 'google' log files. I've been playing in this area and searching is FAST. I'm fiddling around to see how conceptually useful it is to create a Lucene index of sets of log files, and be able to easily and quickly locate logging information. At the moment it's the indexing speed that's not as fast as I would like (minutes for a 40meg log file), but I'm thinking through some other options that could speed that process up considerably.
* ZeroConf (aka Rendevouz) - This relies on the LGPL licensed JmDNS[5] library. I have successfully created some code that automatically discovers SocketHubAppenders located on the network. I foresee a vastly simpler user experience if log4j-enabled applications using Appenders with matching Receivers could broadcast their settings via zeroconf. Within Chainsaw the user could then double click the discovered appender, and Chainsaw could read/parse and create matching Receivers to connect to those appenders. No more XML configs, no more rather lame Receiver creation dialogs. Since this is LGPL licensed, I've started making this as a Plugin (both log4j, and for Chainsaw). I've also emailed the developers to ask if they would consider dual licensing it for Apache, but have heard no reponse at this stage. If there is an Apache-friendly license that does the same thing, please let me know.
[1] - http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/ [2] - http://wiki.apache.org/old/Licensing [3] - http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/vfs/ [4] - http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/index.html [5] - http://jmdns.sourceforge.net/
regards,
Paul Smith
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