techno.blog("Dion")

Log4E is a free Eclipse Plugin which helps you to use your logger easily in Java Projects.

One of the nice features is that you can grab a project that has a bunch of System.out.println()’s and you can convert them to using a real Log system.

One of the scary things is:

Automatic inserts of logger statements at certain method entries: begin of method, exit of method (before every return statement and at the end of method) and in catch blocks.

Although tools like Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, etc are great for helping get stuff in. This doesn’t mean that they are good at going the other way.

What I mean here is that a lot of these great tools help with complexity one way. I have heard a lot of people say “It is so easy to do X in my IDE, it doesn’t matter than the result is a bunch of code”.

What happens when you have to come BACK to the code to understand it? It may have been easy to say “I want a new [insert design pattern here]” and have interfaces, base impls, DTOs, XML config, etc generated at once. However we have to grok this at a later date. This is why it I would rather look at simpler, smaller code!