Application logging

As all developers most likely know, the term logging—when used in any IT context, from programming languages to computer science—is mostly used to define the process of recording application actions and state to a secondary channel. To better understand this definition, we need to grasp the difference between a primary and secondary channel.

All applications are meant to communicate with their users through a dedicated interface, which is often called the user interface, or UI:

• Desktop applications, for example, use the Graphical User Interface (GUI) provided by the Windows (or other operating systems) libraries
• Console applications rely upon the operating system terminal
• Web applications display their data through the web browser

… and so on. In all the preceding examples, the user interface is the main output mechanism used by the software to communicate with users, thus being the application’s primary...