What is Jacson?

Jacson is a Java based, highly configurable, versatile tool to filter text.

Jacson was created when I had to write another special purpose weblog analysis for marketing department. Various old approaches were kicking arround on my hard disk, written with C, sed, awk, grep, cut, uniq and PERL. These suffered from a lack of documentation and portability. Which demonstrated both, my suboptimal programming and the real world programming situtation. Furthermore, in a the lost win-environment, of course I have my GNU, cygwin stuff on all of my machines, but many servers don't. Since some webservers are actually Servlet containers, there had to be a Java somewhere on every of those machines.

The idea was to have (kind of) a replacement for above tools living in the Java world. That is somewhat doing what Apache Ant did to make: Like AntJacson is designed to

• run whereever Java runs.
• things are achieved by configuration with XML rather than programming.
• it is so modular, that it can easily expanded by little programming.

Jacson has been used or is used for

• logfile analysis
• program source patching
• logfile monitoring

• mailbox filtering
• certain linugistic experiments