[logback-user] Help with Tomcat -> GUI Viewer logging setup

[Steve Johnson]

  Greetings,

I apologize in advance if my question is obviously documented somewhere 
already.  If so, I haven't been able to find those docs and would 
welcome being simply pointed to them.

I'm looking to switch to Logback after years of struggling with log4j 
and chainsaw within a Tomcat environment.  I'm hoping to get some advice 
up front to save me frustration in getting to what I want with Logback.

What I'd like to do is have multiple web applications running in a 
single Linux hosted Tomcat instance log to the same log stream.  I'd 
like this stream to be viewable on a remote Windows workstation via a 
GUI app (via Lilith, I guess).  Preferably, multiple GUIs on different 
workstations ought to be able to view the log stream simultaneously.  
Also, it would be great if something like ZeroConf could be used such 
that no mucking with config files and IP addresses will be necessary.

I've had some luck getting all of this going with log4j and chainsaw, 
but the system has always been kinda flakey.  I had everything set up 
with ZeroConf, but I had to write my own version of the 
ZeroConfSocketHubAppender to bump the port number when a socket bind 
failed to deal with the fact that multiple appenders would be created by 
my various web applications and would otherwise all contend for the same 
local port.  I want something more reliable and robust.

So, can anyone offer suggestions for getting to such a setup with 
Logback?  Which sort of appender should I use?  What gotchas should I be 
aware of?

I quickly reviewed the document "Access log with logback, Jetty and 
Tomcat", but I find that document kinda confusing.  Does this module 
simply offer a web interface to logs, or is it something more?  Would it 
be any help in my situation if I'm not interested in accessing logs via 
HTTP?

TIA for any help you can provide.

Steve