On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 2:19 AM, Ralph Goers <[email protected]>wrote:

>
> 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.
>

I see you changed formatAs(LogEvent) to toSerialized(LogEvent) but I do not
feel this is correct because the object has not been serialized, it has
merely been converted into an object that *can be *serialized, hence my
proposal for toSerializable(LogEvent), because the method returns a
Serializable.

Gary


> Ralph
>
>


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