[logback-dev] What is the most efficient way - preferrably platform agnostic - to submit events from "the outside"?

[Ralph Goers]

On Mar 2, 2009, at 8:33 AM, Joern Huxhorn wrote:

> Exactly.
> We are just trying to find a less fragile approach than serialization
> for the events sent using SocketAppender (or my multipex-appenders).
> Ideally, it should be platform- and programming-language-neutral and
> shouldn't perform much worse than java serialization.
> protobuf seems to be a ideal candidate from what I've read so far.  
> I'll
> definitely give it a try.

This is a completely different problem than what the subject line  
implies. Are you presupposing that the decision to use the  
SocketAppender to get a LogEvent into a remote Logback has already  
been made? Even so, what service in the remote system would the  
Appender call? AFAIK there is nothing in Logback today to handle that .

The way I read the subject line is "something" wants to act as a  
Logback remote client and feed events into a system where Logback is  
running. The client might be an appender or something completely  
different.

>
>
> While this is just a subset of "send this logging event there" I had  
> the
> impression that the question of transport was already solved more or
> less. There's little alternative to a message based approach (int
> containing size of data followed by data bytes) if Java  
> serialization is
> not used.

Here you seem to be making the classic confusion between messaging and  
RPC. The only real difference is that RPC contains information about  
what service to invoke. In actuality many "messaging" systems do the  
exact same thing. They just embed the name of the service in the  
message and use their own proprietary logic to figure out what to do  
with the message based on the data received instead of just using  
something standard.

>
>
> Any kind of RMI will *definitely* be slower than this approach and we
> should evaluate it as an additional possibility after implementing the
> high-speed one.

Who said anything about RMI?

Ralph