A Debug Log

One would imagine that logging has been largely solved at this point. Simple tasks, like, “Only print this message when we’re in debug mode,” seem like obvious, well-understood features for any logging library.

“LostLozz offers us a… different approach to this problem.

if ( LOG.isDebugEnabled() ) {
	try {
		Integer i = null;
		i.doubleValue();
	}
	catch ( NullPointerException e ) {
		LOG.debug(context.getIdentity().getToken() + " stopTime:"
				+ instrPoint.getDescription() + " , "
				+ instrPoint.getDepth(), e);
	}
}

If we’re in debug mode, trigger a null pointer exception, and catch it. Then we can log our message, including the exception- presumably because we want the stack trace. Because there’s not already a method for doing that (there is).

I really “love” how much code this is to get to a really simple result. And this code doesn’t appear in the codebase once, this is a standardized snippet for all logging. Our submitter didn’t include any insight into what instrPoint may be, but I suspect it’s a tracing object that’s only going to make things more complicated. getDescription and getDepth seem to be information about what our execution state is, and since this snippet was widely reused, I suspect it’s a property on a common-base class that many objects inherit from, but I’m just guessing. Guessing based on a real solid sense of where things can go wrong, but still a guess.