log4j-aws-appenders now supports Logback

I started my Log4J appenders project because I wasn't happy with how the AWS CloudWatch agent broke apart logfiles. It seemed, as I said in the FAQ, like it would be an easy weekend project. That was nearly two years ago.

In the interim, I added support for Kinesis Streams (a year ago) to support search-engine-based centralized logging using AWS managed Elasticsearch. Surprisingly, it wasn't until after that implementation effort that I truly “bought into” the benefits of using a search engine to examine logs. Now I can't imagine going back to grep.

After giving a talk on centralized logging to the local Java users' group, some of the feedback that I got was “it's nice, but we're not using Log4J 1.x.” So in the early fall I started to break the library into pieces: a front-end that's tied to a particular logging framework, and a back-end that handles communication with AWS. This turned out to be quite easy, which I think means that I had a good design to start with.

Then it was a matter of picking another logging framework, and learning enough about it to be able to implement appenders. I picked Logback because it's the default logging framework for Spring, and because it's the native back-end for SLF4J (which I've been using with Log4J for around five years now).

One of the interesting things that came out of this work is that I now see a good use case for multiple inheritance. There's an enormous amount of duplicated code because each appender has two is-a relationships: one to the logging framework and another to the back end. It would be nice if Java had something like Scala traits, where each trait would encapsulate one of the is-a relationships, and the appender would just be a combination of traits. On the other hand, I've seen enough ugly code using traits that I still think Gosling et al made the right decision.

Log4J 2.x is up next, although I think I'm going to take a break for a few months. I have several other projects that have taken a back seat, including a library of AWS utility classes that I started a year ago and hasn't seen its first release.

Happy Holidays!