Originally posted by Gregg Bolinger:
A. Why are your end users needing to see information that is sent to System.out and System.err? Better yet, why is your application writing messages to those streams?
B. This is something you didn't think to do? Capture those streams? You spent $20+ dollars to learn that? To me, that doesn't seem a fair tradeoff. For you that is.
Everybody has to learn somehow... I did a very similar thing when I was starting out in Java development and it got the job done. Today, I would never do it, but neither would I think it a stupid thing to do. If you're on your own with no senior developer to tell you what's possible, the only way to grow as a programmer is to experiment and read what others have done. The disadvantages of this approach may become apparent (it's perfectly adequete in some cases, if inelegant) and spur further development.
I haven't read the book in question, but $20 is not so bad.