[slf4j-user] Per-web-app logging with jars on the server's classpath

[Mark Stralka]

We have a custom web framework packaged into a jar file (myframework.jar) that 
is used by 50 web applications deployed as WAR files on Weblogic 8.1 SP4. 
myframework.jar uses the Spring framework internally (which uses commons 
logging API), so we must continue to use SLF4J's jcl104-over-slf4j-1.3.0.jar
for the foreseeable future.  None of these web apps use EJBs and I want to 
avoid them.

myframework.jar, log4j.jar, slf4j*.jar spring.jar, and dozens of other 3rd 
party dependencies are loaded on Weblogic's server classpath.  
myframework.jar is under continual development by my team and we can't 
redeploy every WAR file with the new version of libraries in WEB-INF/lib - 
so we have to load myframework and other JARs on weblogic's classpath.  
Each web app has very few Java classes of its own - most are Spring-injected 
from myframework.jar.

This has proven to be an interesting puzzle because we want each web app to 
write to its own log file (appA.log, appB.log, etc), but be able to record 
log entries from classes inside myframework.jar, spring.jar, etc for 
debugging purposes.

I bought the Log4J book, read Chapter 8, and followed the JBoss instructions 
here http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Log4jRepositorySelector 
to create a custom RepositorySelector (which loads /WEB-INF/log4j.properties), 
and modified myframework's StartupListener to initialize this 
RepositorySelector in each web app's web.xml.

The problem is that when I start weblogic with several webapps (appA.war, 
appB.war, appC.war, etc), all log entries are written to appA.log, even 
though each application has its own WEB-INF/log4j.properties (albeit they 
are currently all the same, except for the "log4j.appender.file.File" value).

Am I doing something wrong to keep JAR files at the server level but let 
each web app write to its own log file?  Thank you

Here is appA's log4j.properties file:
log4j.rootLogger=warn, file

### direct messages to file <app name>.log ###
log4j.appender.file=org.apache.log4j.DailyRollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.file.DatePattern='.'yyyy-MM-dd
#Each app should go to its own log file but they are not
log4j.appender.file.File=c:/logs/appA.log
log4j.appender.file.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.file.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss,SSS} 
%5p %C{1} - %m%n

log4j.logger.org.apache.struts=error
log4j.logger.org.apache.commons=error
log4j.logger.org.apache.jcs=error
log4j.logger.org.springframework=error
log4j.logger.org.hibernate=error
log4j.logger.org.acegisecurity=error

#Make sure you turn logging off before deploying to staging or production.
log4j.logger.com.myframework.core=debug