Having fun with logging and I18N

I must confess, that game I’m leasurely working on is nothing but a big fat excuse to dabble with fun bits of technology that I don’t get to touch with my usual projects. And in that optic, yesterday I fooled around with logging and internationalization stuff.

… Yes, I know. I’m using a game as a pretext to work on logging and I18N. I’m ashamed of myself. But aaanyway, let’s see what I got to discover.

Log::Dispatchouli - smells good, works even better

I don’t think I’m making much of a mistake by saying that the two king modules in the Perl world for logging are Log::Log4perl and Log::Dispatch. Log::Dispatchouli is built on top of the latter, and is meant to simplify its use for the usual use cases. It was on my radar before, but I never got around using it. Rjbs’ first advent entry, however, whet back my appetite to play with it, and my little game is giving me a perfect excuse to do so.

Within the context of the game, I want to use logging not for the application itself, but to report to the players the events that happen during a round. Consequently, I would like all log entries to be identified with the fleet / ship / crew member that issued it. Fortunately, Log::Dispatchouli proxy logging is there to do exactly that.

From the outside of the object, it’s all very simple: just pass the main $logger for the whole application:

my $log = Log::Dispatchouli->new({
        ident     => 'game',
        to_stdout => 1,
        to_self   => 1,
});

my $ship = Ship->new(
    fleet  => 'StarFleet',
    name   => 'USS Rakudo',
    logger => $log,
);

From within the object, it’s not much harder. At the end of the object creation phase I personalize the logger for this specific fleet and ship, and I throw in a few logging help functions:

package Ship;

use Log::Dispatchouli;

use Moose;

has [ qw/ fleet name / ] => ( 
    is       => 'ro',
    required => 1 
);

has logger => (
    is       => 'rw',
    required => 1,
);

after BUILDALL => sub {
    my $self = shift;

    $self->logger( $self->logger
        ->proxy( { proxy_prefix => '[' . $self->fleet . '] ' } )
        ->proxy( { proxy_prefix => '[' . $self->name .'] ' } ) 
    );

};

has max_thrust => ( is => 'ro', default => 10 );

sub internal_log {
    my ( $self, $crew, @message ) = @_;

    $self->logger->log( { prefix => "[$crew] " }, @message );
}

sub engineer_log {
    my ( $self, @msg ) = @_;
    $self->internal_log( 'engineer', @msg );
}

And now if we want the engineer to say something, we can simply use engineer_log:

sub engage_thrusters {
    my $self   = shift;
    my $thrust = shift;

    if ( $thrust > $self->max_thrust ) {
        $self->engineer_log( [ "Thrust reduced to the engine maximum (%s)", $self->max_thrust ] );
        $thrust = $self->max_thrust;
    }

    # thrust code goes here
}

Et voilà, we have logging. The code

$ship->engage_thrusters( 12 );

produces the log output

[22008] [StarFleet] [USS Rakudo] [engineer] Thrust reduced to the engine maximum (10)

Oh, and notice the use of the parameter to_self in the creation of the logger? That’s to tell it to keep a copy of the logs, which can be accessed with the method events(). So that latter I can do, for example:

my @starfleet_log = 
    grep { $_->[1] eq 'StarFleet' } 
    map  { [ m#(?:G|^)[([^]]+)] #g, $' ] }
    map  { $_->{message} } 
         @{ $log->events };

Not that I want to use that verbatim, mind you, as the use of$` is going to slow down everything, but you get the idea: I can still have access to the log within the application without having to play “re-read the log file” game.

Data::Localize - let’s make our crew talk funny

Now that we have our crew talking to us, it’d be nice to give them some personality. After all, StarFleet engineers aren’t expected to talk like their Klingon counterparts, right?

To do that, I’ve resorted to Data::Localize, which for me was a little easier to get working than Locale::Maketext::Simple. To add the functionality to the Ship class, I’ve added the translator to the ship’s computer grid:

has loc => ( 
    is => 'ro',
    default => sub {
        my $loc = Data::Localize->new;
        $loc->add_localizer( 
            class      => 'Namespace',
            namespaces => [ 'Ship::Lingo' ],
        );
        $loc->auto(1);
        return $loc;
    },
    handles => [ qw/ localize / ],
);

Without forgetting to initialize it to the right language at building time:

after BUILDALL => sub {
    my $self = shift;

    $self->logger( $self->logger
        ->proxy( { proxy_prefix => '[' . $self->fleet . '] ' } )
        ->proxy( { proxy_prefix => '[' . $self->name .'] ' } ) 
    );

    $self->loc->set_languages( $self->fleet );
};

And, to make it transparent for the rest of the code, I intercept the messages sent to the log and change them before String::Flogger does its magic:

sub internal_log {
    my ( $self, $crew, @message ) = @_;

    for ( @message ) {
        if ( ref $_ eq 'ARRAY' ) {
            $_->[0] = $self->localize( $_->[0] );
        }
        elsif ( ! ref $_ ) {
            $_ = $self->localize( $_ );
        }
    }

    $self->logger->log( { prefix => "[$crew] " }, @message );
}

All we have to do is to create the lexicon classes, which hold nothing but a big dump hash (I’ve tried to go the way of the po/mo files, but I still have to get the hang of the creation/update process of those puppies):

package Ship::Lingo::StarFleet;

our %Lexicon = (
    "Thrust reduced to the engine maximum (%s)" 
        => q{She canna go that high, capt'n! I'm giving you %s.},   
);

1;

And that’s all there is to it. If we run

my $ship = Ship->new(
    fleet  => 'StarFleet',
    name   => 'USS Rakudo',
    logger => $log,
);

my $other_ship = Ship->new(
    fleet  => 'Klingon',
    name   => 'HMS Vista',
    logger => $log,
);

$ship->engage_thrusters( 12 );
$other_ship->engage_thrusters( 12 );

We’ll get:

[22312] [StarFleet] [USS Rakudo] [engineer] She canna go that high, capt'n! I'm giving you 10.
[22312] [Klingon] [HMS Vista] [engineer] Qovpatlh! The ship can not go beyond 10.