Microlog Development $$$

I have often wondered how many hours I have spent on Microlog. It is countless hours of fun and sometimes frustration. But it is definitely worth it. I guess my wife beg to differ :) Anyway; there is a site called ohloh. This site collects data from the Internet about open source projects. It analyzes the code for a lot of things. For example it checks how well documented the code is. Another interesting metrics is the calculated development cost. Here is a list of the projects that I am involved in:

• Microlog - $ 435,348
• Microproperties - $ 2,955
• Microinstall - $ 12,018
• Voxtr - $ 29,963

Interesting reading. Please notice these figures are not only due to my work, but due to other peoples hard work as well. But is these values realistic or not? What do you think?

Upgrading Voxtr with Microlog

What a sin! I am involved in the Voxtr open source project. The initial code was not made by me, so I found those awful System.out.println() statements. But fear no more; The Voxtr has been upgraded with Microlog.

I would like to take the opportunity to describe how simple it is to use Microlog. First of all you must download Microlog. Next up is to unzip the file that you downloaded. The included microlog.jar must be copied to your project and added to your buildpath. How this is done, depends on your development enviroment.

The second step is to setup Microlog. I prefer to use a properties file. The biggest advantage is that you do not need to change any code when you want to change your Microlog settings. Use the supplied file that is called microlog.properties. Copy this to the source root of your project or to your resource folder if you have one. To configure Microlog using the properties file you add the following code to your main class, which in most cases is the MIDlet class. The setup code looks like this:

Properties properties = new Properties();
log.configure(properties);

Microlog is now configured according to the settings in your microlog.properties file. In each class that you like to do some logging, you add the following code:

private final static Logger log = Logger.getLogger();

public void someMethod(){
// Do the actual logging
log.debug("MicroLog is working!");
}

That is it! Insert logging statements where you would normally put System.out.println() statements.

What good is all the logging if you do not know how to view the log? In this example, the logging is done in two destinations. The ConsoleAppender outputs to the same place all your System.out.println() would go. If you run your MIDlet in the emulator, the output is shown in some kind of console. In Eclipse, this is the "Console" view. The second output destination is the recordstore. To view it you use the RecordStoreLogViewer. Add the RecordStoreLogViewer MIDlet to the JAD file. When you have executed your main MIDlet, it is just a matter of switching to the RecordStoreLogViewer MIDlet. Select the "Load" item in the menu and the log is loaded on the screen. The image below shows the RecordStoreLogViewer with Voxtr log data.

What I have shown here is the setup that I recommend that you start with. The ConsoleAppender is good when using the emulator, and the RecordStoreAppender is good when executing on the target device. This is the default settings in the supplied microlog.properties file. When it is time to do field test, or similar, it is recommended that you start using one of the off-device appenders, for example the MMSAppender. The MMSAppender could be used to send MMS and/or e-mails to the addresses of your choice. Other choices are the Amazon S3 appenders which I have blogged about earlier. I will not go into more details about the off-device appenders right now, I will save it for later. Stay tuned!

Open Source Software Development; Microlog, Microinstall & Voxtr

A couple of years ago I started my first Open Source project; Microlog. This was an attempt to make something similar to Log4j. At that time I was new to Java ME programming. What I wanted was a really simple, but yet powerful logging tool. I started from scratch and within a couple of hours I did have something that I liked. For some reason it just felt right; I wanted to release it as Open Source. Said and done! I also showed it to some of my colleagues and got some feedback. My colleague Darius suggested that I would make the setup of Microlog very simple. Before I knew it, he had contributed with some code for the setup. After that he joined the project. Since I believe in "Release early, release often." I released a couple of small releases rather quickly.

During the years that have gone since then, I have from time to time taken a look at the Microlog project site. The statistics showed that there was a fair amount of downloads. But there was no activity in the forums. Nada, zero, null! :( Since I was not involved in any Java ME development project, there was no natural reason to use Microlog, nor updating the code.


But then there came an e-mail from a developer who wanted to contribute with some code. Wow! Somebody thinks that Microlog has some potential. A couple of days later another person wanted to contribute, and join the project. This was Karsten who now is our Maven specialist in the Microlog team. During the spring and the summer I and the rest of the team has been working very hard to get out the first "real release", i.e. V1.0. We also replaced our old static homepage with an autogenerated site by Maven. During this period we finally got some action in the forums :) Thank you all for the great feedback I have received, this is really motivating me to continue with Microlog.

I have heard many people complain about long URLs that you have to enter to download a MIDlet. Of course you can download the MIDlet to your computer, and then transfer it to your device. Both ways are rather tedious ways of doing the installation of a MIDlet. Therefore I started to think about different ways to distribute MIDlets. My experiments are now available for you to take a look at. Please visit the Microinstall project page site for more information.

I am the co-founder of the Voxtr project. This is a simple voice recorder MIDlet. Since I have a hard time to remember things, it is very practical for me to take "voice notes". No need to find a pen and paper or use that hard-to-use-notepad-application that is bundled on your mobile phone.

That is all for now folks!