Glossary

action

An instance of the Action type, and one of the three fundamental Lithoxyl types. The Action type is rarely instantiated directly, instead they are created by loggers, manipulated, and automatically published to sinks.

emitter

An object capable of publishing formatted messages out of the process. Emitters commonly publish to network services, local services, and files. The last step in the Sensible Filter-Format-Emit logging process.

event

An occurence associated with a Logger and Action. One of:

• begin - The start of an Action.
• end - The completion of an Action (success, failure, or exception)
• warn - A warning related to an Action.
• comment - A metadata event associated with a Logger
• exception - An unhandled exception during an Action.

Sinks implement methods to handle each of these events.

formatter

An object responsible for transforming a action into a string, ready to be encoded and emitted

lithoxyl

Mineralized wood.

logger

An instance of the Logger type. Responsible for facilitating the creation and publication of actions. Generally there is one logger per aspect of an application. For example, a request logger and a database query logger.

sink

Any object implementing the Sink protocol for handling events. Typically subscribed to actions by being attached to a logger. Some basic types of sinks include action emitters, statistics collectors, and profilers.

status

The completion state of an action, meant to represent one of four possible task outcomes:

• Begin - not yet completed
• Success - no exceptions or failures
• Failure - anticipated or application-level unsuccessful completion (e.g., invalid username)
• Exception - unanticipated or lower-level unsuccessful completion (e.g., database connection interrupted)

with

Python’s compact context manager syntax, roughly approximating a “try-finally” block. With blocks have enter and exit hooks that enable tracking of Action events, no matter whether the wrapped code executes successfully or raises an exception.