Question

I think I might be missing the point of having a logging framework for your application. In all the small apps I’ve always written a small ‘Logging’ class and just pass log messages to a method in it which is written to a file.

What is the purpose of a 3rd party logging framework like log4net? Is it thread safety with logging write operations or am I missing something?

Answer 1

That’s an excellent question.

The first reason is ‘why not?’ If you are using a logging framework, then you’ll reap the maintainability benefits of using something already packaged.

The second reason is that logging is subtle. Different threads, sessions, classes and object instances may all come into play in logging, and you don’t want to have to figure this problem out on the fly.

The third reason is that you may find a performance bottleneck in your code. Figuring out that your code is slow because you’re writing to a file without buffering or your hard drive has run out of disk space because the logger doesn’t rollover and compress old files can be a pain in the neck.

The fourth reason is that you may want to append to syslog, or write to a database, or to a socket, or to different files. Frameworks have this functionality built in.

But really, the first answer is the best one; there’s very little benefit to writing your own, and a whole bunch of drawbacks.