The cismet team in Saarland, Germany, have made available a free NetBeans plugin, called BeanMill, for visualizing, sorting, and evaluating your log messages.

The provided features are subtle and flexible, as can be seen from the list of main features:

• Jump to the log messages in the editor
• Jump to stacktrace elements in the editor
• Filter with regular expressions
• Filter with your editor selection on the fly
• Show logmessages from certain classes
• Export/Import logmessages via XML

The homepage for the plugin is http://blogs.cismet.de/gadgets/beanmill/ [1]. Handily, for NetBeans plugin developers, you can also download the plugin's sources there. Getting started with the Beanmill plugin is easy:

1. Go to Tools | Plugins and and use the Settings tab to register the BeanMill update center:
   http://www.cismet.de/updatecenters/beanmill6/updates.xml [2]
2. After adding you are able to download the plugin Beanmill Logging Viewer from the newly created update center:

   

3. When the plugin is installed, you immediately see the BeanMill window:

   

   You can also show the BeanMill window by choosing Window | Beanmill from the menu bar.

4. Now you can use the BeanMill window to evaluate your log message:

   

   There are several handy features, such as a filter:

   
   
   Go here [3] and click the camera to see a movie on everything that the BeanMill plugin provides.