ReCon - Aspect oriented remotely reconfigurable error logging framework for web applications

Web applications need an error logging framework as they can adequately record and store the errors that are encountered either in the web applications or in the usage of them. In the existing MVC(Model-View-Controller) based frameworks, the log settings such as log location, mechanism and logging level are specified for all the modules in a single file which cannot be changed dynamically. Further, for individual modules, the log settings have to be hard coded into application code, confusing the role of the application developers and log administrators. A remotely configurable error logging framework has been proposed in this paper. This paper proposes to use the aspect oriented programming paradigm to weave the code for error logging into the legacy web application. The proposed configurable error logging framework has been tested on an e-Shopping web application built based on the `Ruby on Rails' framework.