Welcome to the home of the Lumberjack project. While this page isn't too exciting right now, I hope to be improving it quickly.

What is Lumberjack? Simply put, Lumberjack is a logging package that can function in distributed environments. I've been in the industry for over five years, and I see one thing at every project I have been at--poor logging facilities, if any at all. Most Java projects are web projects, and many of those are middleware projects that are built on top of N-tier architectures. Being developed at a fast pace, many of these projects just don't have the manhours to think about how they will do logging--they are too busy trying to get the actual project to work. But logging doesn't go away, and when the projects hit debugging and unit testing, suddenly the need for good logging mechanisms becomes immediate.

While not a panacea, Lumberjack is born of my own pain on these projects. It should be a good and robust solution to the general task of N-tiered application logging. My goal is to be of help to others, so please download the code and try it out.

2000.03.19 - I have finished some preliminary tests of Lumberjack versus plain file-based logging. At high enough rates (20 events every millisecond), LJ will experience latency compared to file-based logging. BUT ONLY ON low-powered systems and operating systems that lack proper thread support. On your average server system, you will see equal if not better performance than file-based logging (e.g. the load is pushed out of your application and into a helper program). I'm pretty excited, since this was some pretty thorough testing and LJ lived up to its design goals!!

This release is a major change. Everyone using the LJ package currently should upgrade to the newest release.

I haven't figured out how to get the build process to work reliably on Windows (i.e. make, configure, etc.). I have tried Cygnus's cygwin package and met with limited success. I still can't get the Makefiles to compile (I think it might be a path problem, with javac specifically, using / instead of \??). Any input or help on how to get this to build on Windows would be appreciated. For now, try changing to the src/java directory under the root package directory and executing javac from there. With a "javac com\lucide\lumberjack\*.java" you should be able to get most of the files compiler using javac's dependency mechanisms.

Many, many thanks to the generous people at VA Linux and Sourceforge!