The eXtensible Logfile Format 2.0 Project

The eXtensible Logfile Format is an attempt at developing a standard extensible logfile format.

Ad-hoc log files are everywhere! Logfiles are usually created as an afterthought - especially in smaller shops or in-house projects, but even major applications create log files that look like they could have benefitted from a bit more foresight. Debugging logs are even more ad-hoc, yet are just as important as "official" logs, and often end up with lifespans that are every bit as long.

Programs rarely stand alone anymore - why should their histories be balkanized into incompatible formats? When more than one application has participated in a significant event on your system, ad-hoc logfile formats make it a pain to merge or analyze logs from disparate programs that have participated in some foul-up that you later need to examine.

What we need is a standard logfile format that is simple enough to get used by a majority of real-world projects & products, yet flexible enough to be useful to varied applications with idiosyncratic needs.

The Development Effort

XLF 1.0 was developed in 1998 by a group headed by Don Park. The format that we've designated as XLF 1.9.1 was independently developed this year by ourselves for AutoIntern 2.0. But we also designed XLF so that it could be developed further, through an open-source standards process, into a truly public and popular XLF 2.0 standard.

The current version is XLF 1.9.2. We will be incrementing this developing standard until the community of XLF developers & other stakeholders comes to a consensus that the standard is useful and stable. At that point we'll designate the standard as "XLF 2.0".

• Toward a Standard Extensible Logfile Format
• The XLF 1.9.1 Specification
  The XLF 1.9.1 Schema
• The XLF 1.9.2 Specification
  The XLF 1.9.2 Schema

Be sure to join the forum at SourceForge so you can take part in the discussions, and help develop the standard documents & standard libraries.