The Dangers of Soft Coding

[Thorin]

Nice little essay about Soft Coding (the practice of putting too much in config files for fear of hard coding): http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Soft_Coding.aspx

[Mr. Analog]

I've seen this sort of thinking gone to extremes where there was a bootstrapper for the bootstrapper (Yo Dawg).

[Darren Dirt]

my current OracleUCM import/export tool I've been working on in Java/Eclipse has resulted in me almost heading too far in that direction. At first I created a handful of debug-flag constants ... that soon enough became variables as I got pieces to work and made my main() process the args[] to allow for those same debug flags to be set (i.e. to over-ride the in-code defaults with some external-argument override values).

That way I can easily have a couple of different run configurations depending on the level of detail I want to see as it runs. Most of the time I run with the extra flags turned off, but when something really screwy is happening and I don't want to step thru line by line (yet!) then I rely on my extra detail being output to see what's the status of things as it progresses.


But I definitely should read the linked dailywtf article to see just how bad an extreme I coulda taken it...

[Thorin]

Would log4j help you, Darren?  Then you could put LogError(), LogInfo(), LogTrace() calls in your code and turn the logging up or down with a logging config file.  I've used log4net which is based on log4j, and it's been really quite nice to use.

Although I'm assuming by different configurations you just mean different levels of logging.  Or do you actually have different code running in different configurations?

[Darren Dirt]

Would log4j help you, Darren?  Then you could put LogError(), LogInfo(), LogTrace() calls in your code and turn the logging up or down with a logging config file.  I've used log4net which is based on log4j, and it's been really quite nice to use.

Yeah, probably.

[Thorin]

The beauty of log4j, by the way, is that if your code is split into multiple classes and you only care about detailed logging for one class, you can turn up the logging level just for that class and not have your logfiles cluttered with logging from classes you don't care about.

It's a beautiful thing