Almost 6 months ago, I asked a question on stackoverflow "[Software to help in log analysis?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4020025/software-to-help-in-log-analysis)"

Please look at that question before reading ahead.

It turned out that there is no good software available currently that can intermix log files based on timestamps and present them in a good UI.

I wanted to take initiative and develop something and open source it once its completed.

Earlier, I worked around by writing a quick and dirty piece of code in c++, that would generate a tab separated file (like csv but tab separated) which I would later opened in Excel.

I am not satisfied with my c++ code for the following reasons:
1. It totally depends on Excel to view the output file later.
2. Since there is no UI involved, its not easy to write its commandline everytime.
3. Because of the learning curve of the commandline, its not so much sharable with other team members (and the world).

For the above reasons (and a few more), I was thinking to develop that as a web solution. That way I can share the working instance with everyone.

What I have in mind is a web based solution something like this:

* The user will be able to give the input log files using HTML5's File API.
* And then user would probably tell the format of the timestamp associated with each log file.
* Thereafter, the javascript would process those log files into intermixed HTML output in a table.

I am just a beginner in web based technologies. So I need your help in determining if this would be the best way to go about it?

I want a web solution, but that doesn't mean I want user to upload his log files for backend processing. I want a web-based client only solution.

Thanks for your inputs.

**EDIT:** Based on comment below by Raynos 

> 
> @bits You do realise that browsers
>  were not meant to handle large pieces
>  of data. There was
>  stackoverflow.com/questions/4833480/…
>  which shows that this can cause
>  problems.
> 
> 
> 

I feel that doing this in browsers isn't the best deal. Probably, I should explore backend based solutions.
Any ideas or suggestions?