After reviewing the LF5Appender class, I've got some initial thoughts if
someone can review and provide feedback.

If I understand it all correctly, once the LF5Appender class has been
instantiated from being an appender in a local log4j environment, a separate
Swing GUI is auto-instantiated and shown to display the incoming log events.
That's pretty cool.  

In a single Receiver model, which is what the initial revision of ChainSaw
would be I think, we could follow the LF5 approach almost identically.  It's
probably worth the refactoring to go towards this model initially.

Thinking further ahead though, what are the possibilities of defining more
than one ChainSawAppender.  I can see windows popping up everywhere.. ;)   

Let's see if I can draw an ASCII diagram of Nirvana here:


REMOTE_SERVER1 \                    /--> ChainSawAppender1
REMOTE_SERVER2  --> LOCAL_LOG4J_VM  ---> ChainSawAppender2  
REMOTE_SERVER3 /                    \--> ChainSawAppender3

In the above, each Remote server is broadcasting the log events to the Local
log4j event bus (or in the new Reciever model, there are 3 Receivers
configured to connect to each Server).  The local bus then configures a
series of ChainSawAppenders according to it's own Category/Level filter in
the log4j.xml. 

However at this point, is there any _need_ to spawn a GUI window for each
Appender?  Rather than the model receiving events and spawning a window,
perhaps another way to look at it is that a ChainSawLogPanel "attaches"
itself to one of the known ChainSawAppenders for display. That way the user
can hide/close windows, while the ChainSawAppender (which is itself the
TableModel) is still able to receive events in the background.

The ChainSaw main GUI window can then contain multiple tabs, or via MDI.  We
could have multiple GUI Panels attached to the same ChainSawAppender to
provide the ability to have separate "query" windows of the same source.
(i.e. perhaps the filtering mechanism for each query panel is a decorator of
the ChainSawAppender/TableModel).  

Hope this isn't all waffle.

cheers,
_________________________
Paul Smith 
Lawlex Compliance Solutions
phone: +61 3 9278 1511
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]



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