Microlog Re-started

Finally! I have now re-started my work with Microlog. The re-start took longer than expected; Maven was giving me a hard time. To start with it did not manage to create a jar archive, but a NullPointerException. Since the compilation worked I find it strange that Maven did not manage to create a jar archive. Very strange! I use Maven 2.0.9 since some other project that I am involved in require that version. Anyway I decided to upgrade Maven to the latest stable version. Voila! Problem solved! Now another problem occurred; the pre-verification failed. Some libraries was included several time, which caused ProGuard to emit a lot of warnings. After a couple of minor changes the build managed to finish without any errors. All in all this took an hour or so. Time that I much rather spend on development, than on fixing Maven related problems.

I finally got around to make what I really wanted to do; implement something that I call aliases. Please let me explain what I mean. A lot of users has complained about being forced to know the name of the Appender and Formatter classes when creating their configuration files, aka properties files. The solution was quite simple. I put an alias in a Hashtable together with the real classname. Let us see how it looked like before my changes:

microlog.appender=net.sf.microlog.core.appender.ConsoleAppender;net.sf.microlog.midp.appender.RecordStoreAppender
microlog.appender.RecordStoreAppender.recordStoreName=MyRMSName
microlog.appender.RecordStoreAppender.maxLogEntries=40
microlog.formatter=net.sf.microlog.common.format.PatternFormatter
microlog.formatter.PatternFormatter.pattern=%c [%P] %m %T

With aliases it looks like this:

microlog.appender=ConsoleAppender;RecordStoreAppender
microlog.appender.RecordStoreAppender.recordStoreName=MyRMSName
microlog.appender.RecordStoreAppender.maxLogEntries=40
microlog.formatter=PatternFormatter
microlog.formatter.PatternFormatter.pattern=%c [%P] %m %T

You could now use the appenders and formatters without knowing their full classname. This goes for all the built-in appenders and formatters. I think this feature is rather handy. What do you think?