On Oct 9, 2012, at 5:28 PM, Gary Gregory wrote: > On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Ralph Goers <[email protected]> > wrote: > This requires a long answer. > > Ceki realized in Logback that OutputStreams really needed a byte array. So > he changed Appenders to require an Encoder instead of an Appender. Layouts > still return a String so he created a wrapper Encoder to convert the String > to a byte array. > > The idea of using a byte array is correct - most of the time, as most of the > Appenders use an OutputStream. However, the JMS appenders don't. They > require a Serializable object. > > When developing Log4j I did not like having both Encoders and Layouts, so I > chose to have Layouts return a byte array. But then it made no sense to have > something based on the AbstractStringLayout convert the String to a byte > array only to have to convert it back to a String again for the JMS > Appenders, which is why I added formatAs(). Now the JMS Appender can send > both a Serialized LogEvent and a String. > > So in looking at how formatAs() is used I would think that we could just > change Layout to > > public interface Layout { > > Serializable formatAs(); > > ... > } > > OK, so we loose some type info, but that seems OK. > > While we are here, I think the format methods need better name especially > since there are two and formatAs(LogEvent) is not great, I keep on thinking > "format as... what?" A log event? No, that's what I pass in. What about using > the to* convention here? > > - byte[] toByteArray(LogEvent); > - Serializable toSerializable(LogEvent); >
Yes - I like those names better. Ralph
