Hi, I am looking for some direction or historical memories about the possibility to have a SocketAppender that does not serialize the payload. (This is to be able to read at the other end with a non Java based program...) Browsing the code it seems that one possibility is to have a derived class of SocketAppender to implement getPST() to return a PreSerializationTransformer that does no transformations, but then the event object is (/seems to be) written to an ObjectOutputStream. This means, I guess, that even if you write a custom serialization code and avoid any transformations, in the end, the event will still be written to the pipe as a java object. Please comment on the above statements and provide directions or examples for further explorations. Thanks a lot in advance Bye -- Enrico Spinielli "Do Androids dream of electric sheep?"— Philip K. Dick "Hear and forget; see and remember;do and understand."—Mitchel Resnick "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."—John McCarthy