Asynchronous logging

Question

Hi,
I've developed an application which uses Java logging framework for logging. Lately I've thought to make logging asynchronous. So, log messages across the application should be posted to a queue and a thread should read each message, log it, and remove the message from queue.
I understand that this is a producer consumer problem and have some threading knowledge also; but wanted to know if this is already offered as part of Java concurrent utils.
I just migrated from Java 1.4 to 1.6 and did not see the concurrent utils much, any directions would be helpful to effectively proceed further.
Any thoughts?
Thanks for your time on this!

Answer 1

yes, the java.util.concurrent.BlockingQueue is pretty much the standard now for producer/consumer type scenarios.
as a point of design, you may want to manage the "asynchronous" part within the logging framework (as opposed to making the code which generates the log messages aware of all this). you could setup your own Handler which queues the LogRecords. additionally, if you care about the source class/method names (in the LogRecord), then you should call getSourceMethodName() before you put the LogRecord on the queue (because that info is determined lazily, so you need to force it to be resolved in the correct context). calling that one method will initialize both the source method and source class name.