I'm a fan of this idea (if you couldn't already tell). A couple disadvantages that come to mind is lack of syntax-checking in the string and painful refactoring (it requires the programmer to search every formatted string for correctness). In any case, what would be the appropriate action for syntax errors that are discovered at runtime?

-Tony

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 12:17 PM, Tony Trinh <tony19@gmail.com> wrote:
+1 !!


On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Chris Pratt <thechrispratt@gmail.com> wrote:
Sure, it uses an extension of the java.text.MessageFormat syntax that allows for unlimited formatted varargs, and allows using dot-notation to prevent evaluation of the methods until it's been deemed necessary.  With the current libraries (all of them really), you have to evaluate all the javabeans that hold the data you are looking to log before it's decided whether to log the information or not.  In other words:

log.debug("Loading Student [" + sdnt.getNumber() + "] " + sdnt.getName() + " Enrolled: " + new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd").format(sdnt.getEnrollmentDate()));

Means that a lot of work is done and discarded when the debug level on this file is set to info or less.  SLF4j is a little better, but not much:

log.debug("Loading Student [{}] {} Enrolled: {}",new Object[] {sdnt.getNumber(),sdnt.getName(),new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd").format(sdnt.getEnrollmentDate())});

Yes, of course you could (and probably should) wrap each and every call to the log system in if(log.isDebugEnabled()) {}.  But we all know that is ugly and easy for Jr programmers to forget.  My library puts off the evaluation until after it's been decided that the information is necessary, then efficiently outputs the message, like this:

log.debug("Loading Student [{0.number}] {0.name} Enrolled: {0.enrollmentDate,date,yyyy-MM-dd}",student);

No muss, no fuss and the TextFormat utility is completely usable standalone (as well as the advanced dot-notation utilities).
  (*Chris*)