Send logs from a REST service to an HTML page

Question

I have a REST service on a server A. The service is doing some stuff and logging some messages thanks to log4j.

Aside, I have a web page on server B that is calling the service thanks to AJAX and getting the response. Apart from receiving the response (which works fine to me), I would like to print on the page the log messages from the server side.

In other words, I would like that every time there is a new log message on server A side, the view display it.

Any ideas to achieve that ?

EDIT: How to use a websocket to retrieve logs from a log4j socket appender?

Answer 1

You would create a REST endpoint to retrieve the raw log data as text/plain . It could be something as following:

GET /logs HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/plain

You also could provide some query string parameters to filter the logs by date and time, as following:

GET /logs?from=2016-07-03T10:00:00Z&to=2016-07-04T10:00:00Z HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/plain

Then your client can request such endpoint, retrieve the data they want to and display the logs in a HTML page.

If you prefer rendering the HTML page on server side, instead of accepting text/plain , accept text/html .

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For real time logging, you could consider WebSockets .

Answer 2

I finally found a way to solve my problem:

I have created a singleton logger. Every time I want to log a message, I am getting the instance of the logger and add the new message to the ConcurrentLinkedList of logs.

On the other hand, I have created a new rest service. Every second I call this service with an ajax query. It removes the log messages of the list and return them. The view display them.