CodeSOD: A Debug Log

One would imagine that logging has been largely solved at this point. Simple tasks, like, "Only print this message when we're in debug mode," seem like obvious, well-understood features for any logging library.

"LostLozz offers us a... different approach to this problem.

if ( LOG.isDebugEnabled() ) {try {Integer i = null;i.doubleValue();}catch ( NullPointerException e ) {LOG.debug(context.getIdentity().getToken() + " stopTime:"+ instrPoint.getDescription() + " , "+ instrPoint.getDepth(), e);}}

If we're in debug mode, trigger a null pointer exception, and catch it. Then we can log our message, including the exception- presumably because we want the stack trace. Because there's not already a method for doing that (there is).

I really "love" how much code this is to get to a really simple result. And this code doesn't appear in the codebase once, this is a standardized snippet for all logging. Our submitter didn't include any insight into what instrPoint may be, but I suspect it's a tracing object that's only going to make things more complicated. getDescription and getDepth seem to be information about what our execution state is, and since this snippet was widely reused, I suspect it's a property on a common-base class that many objects inherit from, but I'm just guessing. Guessing based on a real solid sense of where things can go wrong, but still a guess.

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