I have been following Matthiou Rieu’s Raven project using Rake and Gems to improve the Java build experience. Now he and Matthew Foemmel have got together to merge Raven and JRake.
I have high hopes for this and will be watching developments with interest.
I do hate it when I’ve been dense. I hate it even more when I have been smugly dense.
I have always had a thing about applications producing to much logging. Generally a production log line should only be produced if it is needed. That is if someone is going to look at it and take action on it or it is going to be part of an audit trail of some kind. I get quite worked up about the issue (a developer on my team once deployed an application that produced several Gigabytes of logging a day; “just in case”.)
Anyway, a couple of days ago, I had just related to Steve Freeman that in another project a previous developer had developed a rather byzantine Java logging framework that required a logging API to be passed in to all classes. I was sitting back waiting for the inevitable “yeah, what an idiot” response when Steve actually said “sounds like a good idea”.
Huh?
“Well”, continued Steve [this is from memory], “passing in the API allows you to test the log output of the class and, as logging is part of the class API it should be tested. If it is important that that line is produced you should test it. If it isn’t then you shouldn’t produce it.”
DOH! There we are, very succinct and to the point. If your production system produces it you should test it. Completely obvious in retrospect, and it may help solve the over logging problem most teams seem to have too.