Hi Maarteen, I really like the idea of pluggable encoders. Putting UnsyncronizedAppenderBase aside for a second, I could imagine the following class hierarchy: interface LayoutAware extends Appender; interface EncoderAware extends Appender; abstract class AppenderBase implements Appender; abstract class LayoutAwareAppenderBase ext. AppenderBase implements LayoutAware; abstract class EncodrAwareAppenderBase ext. AppenderBase implements LayoutAware; class WriterAppender extends LayoutAwareAppenderBase; class FileAppender extends WriterAppender; ... class SocketAppender extends EncoderAwareAppenderBase; Appenders such as DBAppender and SMTPAppender, where LoggingEvent to byte[] encoding nor layouts make sense, could extend AppenderBase directly. We should pursue this.... Maarten Bosteels wrote:
Hello,
I agree with Joern, it would be cleaner to have a LayoutAware interface, and only appenders that use a Layout should implement it. The way it is now, people can set a layout on the SocketAppender, they don't get an exception, but the layout would never be used.
I can understand the "historical" reasons, but IMO things like this can be changed as long as logback doesn't reach 1.0Maarten
Related idea/proposal: an Encoder interface similar to Layout but returning a byte array instead of a String:
public interface Encoder { byte[] encode(LoggingEvent event) }
I recently worked on an AsyncSocketAppender (extending UnsyncronizedAppenderBase) and with this interface the wire-format would be pluggable.
Some wire-formats I am thinking about: Apache Thrift, Google protobuf and of course Java serialization.
I still have to implement these encoders and compare their perfomance. I will let you know when I get there.
It would be really cool if we could define a wire-format based on Protobuf and/or Thrift that could also be used for encoding log4j events. But I guess it would be better to do this in a separate project ...
regards, Maarten
-- Ceki Gülcü Logback: The reliable, generic, fast and flexible logging framework for Java. http://logback.qos.ch