LBi Logger

Here in LBi London, as you can see, we are refining our tools to improve our productivity on create, debug and handover our software. An area I felt it could be improved was the debugging.

There are different interesting solutions to debug projects, someone really interesting. Xray, for instance, permits to browse your entire movie and check all the properties of the elements. It contains inside also a simple logger. I've been used to use traces to debug applications, probably also because I find disturbing having to browse all the application structure to get to an item. I believe that logging is still a good way to debug or test applications but that it is an area where the solutions available are not really satisfying or that could be easily improved. Our main IDE is Eclipse, and the two loggers I tested are NTail and LogWatcher. They are quite popular and they can satisfy most of the need when reading logs, but Flash applications, for instance, because of their complexity (they can involve data management, animations, user interactions) can generate quite big and messy logs. My goal was thus to provide a logger to easily organize visually the logs, this can happen adding runtime setting setup (to define log styles to particular logs) and adding some interactivity, like for instance the filtering of Alessandro's FlashTracer.

LBi Logger is a "Highly customizable and interactive Eclipse plug-in to view log files".

The project is still on its early stages, I'm using it daily and since I would like to keep it simple, also for performance reasons, I want to be sure about a feature's need before adding it.

If it sounds interesting to you please have a look at the project page and if you think it can be improved, please tell us your ideas.