On the benefits of the Maven switch

One of the really cool things about Maven is how well-supported it is. Ironically, I realized this while trying to figure out how to solve a bug in Maven-Tycho.
Long story short: My build machine at home is running Windows and that is causing troubles with Tycho doing cross-platform builds on it.

For several reasons, switching the OS is not an option for me and so I went on looking for alternatives. I came across CloudBees, which — as their company name suggests — are offering a bunch of services in the cloud. Most notably, a free Jenkins instance.

The service works suprisingly well so far. And thanks to the power of Maven, setting it up was a breeze. A picture tells a thousand words 🙂

CloudBees Jenkins instance

1.0.3 out now!

Because of a rather nasty bug, here comes another update!

Changes in this release:
Fixed NullPointerException when synchronizing log resources that have no timestamp field (ID: 3485287). Please note: In such a case, the log resource is now automatically truncated before each synchronize to avoid duplicates.

The auto-truncate will also be performed in case a timestamp field does exist, but with no date component (i.e. HH:mm:ss).

1.0.2 is here!

The long overdue release 1.0.2 is out now! It brings some bugfixes and improvements, most notably:
– When adding a new log resource, patterns are remembered and can be re-used (use CTRL+Space in the pattern text field)
– New JBoss 7 log dialect
– Fixed bugs when pattern did not contain timestamp
– Updated Eclipse runtime to 3.7 and Lucene to 3.5

As usual, you can get it from SourceForge.net or via the built-in update function.

The next release

As for updates: There have been a whole lot of changes since the 1.0.1. Though, most of them were somehow related to the Git move or some infrastructure changes (Eclipse updates, Lucene updates etc.), so there is no real benefit for the user.

The only real changes that come to my mind right now are: support for JBoss AS 7 and a minor bugfix related to pagination. But since the last release is getting quite old now, I’m looking forward to release a minor update within the next few weeks.

Build infrastructure changes

First of all, sorry for the slow updates! I’ve been quite busy lately, and LogSaw already does pretty much all I need, so the pressure for me to make changes has been quite low. Though, it’s still all alive and development should continue soon 🙂

I have been playing around with Buckminster some more recently, and I ended up making the whole development process alot easier (did I already mention, that I really like Bucky?). So, if you ever wanted to play around with the LogSaw source yourself, but were unsure on how to get started: The new Building LogSaw tutorial should help you to get started.

Switch to Git SCM completed

I have just completed moving the source code to Git SCM. The master repository is now hosted on GitHub. However, a clone of it is also hosted on SourceForge because it doesn’t allow to point to an external Git repo only.

Then again, Git is very capable in terms of syncing multiple repos so this shouldn’t be much of an issue 🙂

My New Year’s Resolutions for LogSaw

So 2010 is almost over and I feel it’s time to share some of the plans I have for this humble project for next year:

  • Move to Git
    I’m not sure whether it is because of SourceForge being so slow or because of Subversion itself, but working with the SVN repository seems terribly painful. With all the cool kids moving to Git, it’s probably time to follow suit.
  • Put out one or more Feature Releases (1.1, …)
    Some feature requests have already been posted in the tracker and some of them should better be implemented sooner than later.
  • Put out Framework Release (2.0?)
    I have often stated that I envision LogSaw as a framework that everyone and his dog can build upon to parse and analyze arbitrary log files or even other data. This will require a major re-engineering effort so it will definitely take some time. But on the other hand, it’s definitely a challenge I’m looking forward to 🙂

1.0.1 out now!

Hot on the heels of 1.0.0 comes the first bugfix release. It’s primarily intended to fix problems on Linux. But to make it a worthwhile upgrade, I have also merged some of the changes from the 1.1 stream: most notably, you won’t need to close a log viewer anymore in order to see new entries after synchronizing the log resource.

As usual, you can get it from SourceForge.net or via the built-in update function.