{"id":172,"date":"2007-09-26T07:35:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-26T07:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/lisa\/post\/2007\/09\/26\/A-well-worn-pattern-Log4Fox.aspx"},"modified":"2007-09-26T07:35:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-26T07:35:00","slug":"a-well-worn-pattern-log4fox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/2007\/09\/26\/a-well-worn-pattern-log4fox\/","title":{"rendered":"A well-worn pattern: Log4Fox"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nWhen I agreed to write articles for FoxTalk again, after a very long absence, I did so with mixed feelings.  David Stevenson<\/a> made a persuasive case and provided a welcoming platform for both C and me to discuss certain areas of our work on VFP 9 that, we knew, would never make the documentation.  Chief among those areas, for me, was the thorny subject of PDF creation within Visual FoxPro, so that was naturally the first article I published. \n<\/p>\n

\nThe PDF article<\/a> and its sister piece<\/a>, which is about many obscure techniques needed to control printing in VFP, were also the first pieces I re-published here on Spacefold.  These two IMHO constitute the contribution that is most uniquely-mine to make, outside the in-the-box bits, to the VFP 9 canon.  I want people to have access to this information.\n<\/p>\n

\nI am very sad about what has happened to FoxTalk, by the way.  I wish these articles were<\/em> properly available without my re-purposing the content.  (Those were the conditions under which I published them, and David enthusiastically agreed.) On alternate Thursdays I also wish I had never come back, after so many years, to watch the journal die a painful death.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Log4Fox<\/a> piece I've just posted to our Spacefold article cache remains, nevertheless, my favorite among my this-century FoxTalk contributions.  And this is a curious thing –because in some ways it's the least original work I've ever done.  It's more like a gloss, or an explication de texte<\/em> from my lit-crit days, than an original short story.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhat I mean to say: Log4Fox is an abbreviated Visual FoxPro code implementation of log4j<\/a>, an instrumentation API that I came to know, and to love, during the years C and I spent working in Java. \n<\/p>\n

\nIt's the right tool for the job.<\/em>  And log4j is one of those designs that make you remember why you thought being a programmer was an art, and a joy, in the first place.\n<\/p>\n

\nIt's not my<\/em> design. Neither is it the anointed design of any vendor, even though vendors provide their own logging APIs (I discuss this a bit in the article).  It's just a really great design. \n<\/p>\n

\nI hope you enjoy my introduction to it, whether you work in Fox or Java or Perl or… anything.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I agreed to write articles for FoxTalk again, after a very long absence, I did so with mixed feelings.  David Stevenson made a persuasive case and provided a welcoming platform for both C and me to discuss certain areas of our work on VFP 9 that, we knew, would never make the documentation.  ChiefRead more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-techspeak","category-visual-foxpro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/lisa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}