About Hatchet

Why?

Logging is important and as systems become more distributed and eventual through the use of queues and services it just becomes more important. I, Garry Shutler, searched for a logger that provided the functionality I was familiar with from log4j:

• Logging to multiple locations (files, services, email) from a single call
• Configuring logging levels on a per-namespace/class level

And the additions given by slf4j:

• A common interface that lets library clients decide on how messages are logged

However, I wanted it to be in style that felt like Ruby.

The nearest I found was log4r but it felt too much like Java-in-Ruby so I set out to scratch my own itch by creating Hatchet.

Goals

The primary goal of Hatchet is to be easy to use. Both from the perspective of developers using it to log messages and from the perspective of people wanting to extend Hatchet by creating their own appenders or creating their own formatters. The secondary goal is to provide all of the functionality previously mentioned.

I know I have achieved these goals for myself as my own itch is well and truly scratched. Hopefully, the rest of the Ruby community will get some benefit from Hatchet too.