Delivered-To: cgu@qos.ch
Subject: JSR47 vs Log4J
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:19:45 +0200
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Thread-Topic: JSR47 vs Log4J
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From: "Alef Arendsen" <alef@smarthaven.com>
To: <java-logging-input@eng.sun.com>
Cc: <cgu@qos.ch>

Hi,

after reviewing a lot of logging APIs and doing some own implementations we found out (a couple of months ago) that Log4J was by far the best logging API out there. Not ony because of its perfect extendability, but also because of its high performance (we couldn't do it any better) and the possibility to keeps things very basic if needed.

Now that Sun is implementing its own logging API I foresee big problems when people start to use both at the same time. Logging output from software from one vendor and our own will kind of clash. This especially when implementing and integrating component based software in for instance a J2EE environment.

What I would greatly appreciate if the future logging API Sun is going to offer at least stays somehow compatible with the Log4J API. Maybe it could be possible to plug in your own logging engine or something like that. This probably won't be possible if the API differ in such fundamental issues like the priorities (JSR47: ALL, SEVER, WARNING, INFO, CONFIG, FINE, FINER, FINEST and OFF, versus Log4J: DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL) and the inheritance of categories and other things like that.

Furthermore it would be very handy if any logging API stays backward compatible with older Java version (at least 1.2, since lots of enterprise systems simply aren't ready yet for Java 1.4).

I would greatly appreciate any kind of reaction on all this.

Alef Arendsen
Software Engineer
SmartHaven - Every Bit Personal
Signature: http://signature.arendsen.net
Website: http://alef.arendsen.net