Log management in Grails Applications (Easy log management and continuous log viewing)

To me one of the most important features of the Grails is the ability to change application behavior in the runtime (We can reload application, controller, filters, gsp files and etc). Hence to change the code, to see the log files,  to back up logs, we need direct application server access. We use telnet, a lot of ssh utilities, or if we have direct access to server machine we can use file explorer and utilities on the machine. However, if we don’t have any of these tools or if we don’t have any direct access to machine, we are stuck.

Nowadays I am really curious about whether we can manage the whole application from the web without server access to solve the above problem. To do this, I started to implement CodeEditor. It goes fine and I will ad many more features to CodeEditor. But, I also think that managing logging mechanism of application is as important as to be able to change code from the web. So, I started to implement another plug-in which is called as LogManager.

LogManager will have the following functionalities:

1. LogManager will have a viewer which is like UNIX tail tool which continuously follows specified file and it print any characters added to to file to screen. LogManager viewer will do the same functionality for Grails application log files. Users will be able to select a log file and file content will be sent to users viewer from server-side. Log file will continuously be polled and any change in the log file will be sent to user.
2. LogManager will be able to roll any log file at any time.
3. LogManager will be able change a lot of logging setting (setting log levels, adding/removing log appenders, etc.)
4. LogManager will persist all of the settings.

I already implemented and finished item 1 and 2. Soon, I will release this plug-in with these functionalities. Later, I will implement item 3 and 4.