Minor Description
Hi, I'm creating this as a patch request but I guess really initially I wanted to verify with everyone that commons lang is the place for this class hierarchy I'm proposing – and if not please suggest whether it would be more appropriate to submit this to collections or one of the other Commons projects. (Or I accept as well the fact that it might not be good enough for any of the commons projects in which case please just let me know so I won't try to create new issues around this in the future.)
Basically I've come across a pattern I find myself using a lot in my applications where I want a quick (and not so dirty) way of monitoring certain things in the application – for instance, I want as a quick healthcheck a page to tell me how many requests we process over a 1 minute interval or so. While one can implement complex monitoring systems to achieve the same, a lot of the times, simply the fact that the number of successful transactions per minute goes down to 50% (after an application upgrade for instance) is a clear indicator to me that something isn't right so I can start investigating straight away and not wait for our monitoring systems to kick in one hour later or so and alert us of this. As such I have developed this component which I have called "Summarizer" (purely as my initial request was just to sum up some numbers over a period of time and reset it regularly – but as my javadoc comments state, of course this doesn't have to be a simple arithmetic sum and can be extended to other operations). The diff I'm proposing here contains the base class and an example of the class using integers which just sums them up – which is as I said the kind of implementation that I have found myself implementing a lot in my apps. I appreciate that the classes are not completely finished and there are no unit tests yet – and that is because as I said at this stage I am trying to figure out whether this component would fit into the Commons Lang component or it would be more appropriate to commit this somewhere else.
I would appreciate your input/comments on this so I know whether i'm on the right track on committing this here or should I move it elsewhere; I accept that perhaps the package names and the class names are not the best, and am willing to discuss with your main committers around this – if this proves to be a valid component for commons.
If you decide this is a good idea to proceed with then I can start adding unit tests and more comments/javadocs around it to make this into a usable class hierarchy.
As suggested by your FAQ's I've created a diff from the root of the folder – if it helps more if I just provide the 2 classes I can do so too – just let me know and I can send you a zip with the 2 classes alone or so.
Looking forward to your comments on this,
Liv