Ant Replies in line
On 4/18/07, ant elder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 4/17/07, Jean-Sebastien Delfino <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip/> I found our current Monitor stuff difficult to follow as well. I suggest > that we start a new discussion thread to discuss monitoring in general, > and try to come up with something that will be more usable and easier to > adopt through our whole runtime. Starting the new thread for you... I agree we should improve monitoring and logging in the runtime. I've used AOP before for this type of thing, its cool, but it does add yet another new thing to know about which could be off putting for new developers. How about just using one of the existing logging packages that most people are already completely familiar with? Commons Logging looks like its coming to its end, no one really likes java.util.logging, so how about SLF4J, its really easy and nice to use?
Simple is good. I've not done much with Aspects but we could really do with keeping down the complexity quotient I think. I'm keen that whatever information we put out can be transported to whatever management solution is used in the future so having a facade for accepting logged information sounds good. We can start off with a simple console logger and migrate to more complex distributed managment/logging solutions if required in the future. I also think exception handling could be improved, I don't find the current
exception formatter design easy to use, and most times stack traces end up missing the important bit of information you need. How about just using the traditional way of putting everything in the exception message and using properties files to allow for I18N?
I agree that I find the current exception messages lacking but I have to admit to not having studied how they are implemented so I'll go take a look and come back on this one. One thing I've wondered about was having a release specifically targeting
these RAS type features. So once we've worked out the strategy for logging, exceptions, internationalization etc we have a release where a big focus is on implementing/fixing/testing all these RAS things.
+1 I'm stringly in favour of this and would very much like to help out. Even if it's not all of the community if a few of us can take a sweep through the code and get the level of error reporting/logging up a notch then that's going to improve our usability no end. People don't expect the software to be perfect but if it fails and doesn't give any clues in lots of cases that that gives a bad impression. This is particulalry the case when the failure is down to user input. So we need to be really careful about loading the assembly model and loading extensions to report any detected inconsistencies in a easy to understand manner. ...ant
Simon
