[Apologise in advance for the lengthy email] Hi All,
I've been thinking about trying to integrate VFS into log4j's Chainsaw v2 (http://logging.apache.org/log4j/docs/chainsaw.html) that we are developing. A great feature would be able to read in remote log files for viewing. We currently support this via a direct URL mechanism, but one has to know the full url, and it doesn't have the full power that VFS seems to have like browsing a remote directory. Aside from some technical questions, which I will get to in a sec, I just wanted to clear whether the following would be ok with the commons community. For a Java Web Start launched version to include VFS, I would need to sign several commons jars using a personal email certificate so that Java Web Start will validate and approve them as part of the Chainsaw launch. If any of the jars in the Web Start app are not signed, it fails miserably for security reasons. The certificate that I would signing with would display my [EMAIL PROTECTED] email inside it. Now obviously I wouldn't have written a single line of the commons code, and just wanted to make sure no-one can foresee a problem with that. We'd obviously give appropriate credit within Chainsaw to the commons-dev team. Now onto the technical side of things.... * Is VFS still in a state of flux? * Does VFS have a feature to dynamically detect which file systems are 'available'? ie. whether HttpClient is available via a class loader etc. Since Chainsaw might be delivered by Web Start, or just Ant'd up, it'd be nice to degrade gracefully if a particular file system, say, Http, cannot be used, because dependant libraries cannot be found. I'm unsure whether any of the FileSystemManager implementations can help me here. Any pointers? * This might be File system specific, but does anyone know whether, for a given FileObject, one might be able to read a portion of the, say, text file, and only grab the first X lines of it for a preview? I'd like Chainsaw to be able to show a short preview before possibly incurring the full expense of streaming the whole log file from the remote file system. * I don't know much about SFTP, but does this support the ability to 'browse' a remote directory? It sounds like it does! (Cool!). I assume if one has setup certificate-based authentication for a local ssh with a remote location, the password wouldn't even be needed here. Would that work? (ie the usual ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file etc) That's all I can think of for now. If anyone is interested in trying out the current stable version of Chainsaw, they can try out this Java Web Start link: http://logging.apache.org/log4j/docs/webstart/chainsaw/chainsawWebStart.jnlp --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
