Back when I was still writing a lot of Win32 apps in Delphi, one of my favorite tools was Smart Inspect, a very nice logging tool that also ships with Java und .NET libraries. Unfortunately, I never got to use it that much, since shortly after I bought it I started to drift more and more into web development.

So, three days ago, I had the sudden impulse to take a break from my regular projects and write a Python client library. Just for fun, mostly, but I can see some opportunities in the future where it might come in handy. I wasn’t expecting that it would take three days either, but some of the final bugs in the end took some time to iron out.

I should also note that:

• It’s a pretty direct port of the Delphi implementation, and thus not as pythonic as it could be, though I took some liberties where it seemed to make a lot of sense. Most significantly, the identifier names were converted to Python style guidelines (using underscores in method names).
• It isn’t complete, either. Apart from some minor stuff, the big things missing are the file and text protocols – I plan to add those at some point later on. Only the TCP and memory protocols are supported right now.

Here are some random examples – more in the readme and test files:

>>> from smartinspect.auto import *
>>> si.enabled = True
>>> si.log_debug("hello world!")

Manual initialization, without using the smartinspect.auto module:

>>> from smartinspect import *
>>> si = SmartInspect("myapp")
>>> si.connections = "tcp(port=4444, timeout=10)"
>>> si.enabled = True
>>> logger = si.add_session("main")
>>> logger.log_debug("hello world!")

Manually logging process flow:

>>> def append(self, obj):
>>>     logger.enter_method("append", self)
>>>     try:
>>>         pass   # so something
>>>     finally:
>>>         logger.leave_method("append", self)

Logging process flow using the decorator:

>>> @logger.track
>>> def append(self, obj):
>>>     pass   # so something

Download: smartinspect.zip