Logging Framework available as an extension?

Question

Does anybody know if the Logging Framework available in JDK 1.4 beta 2 is available as an extension to be used with JDK 1.3?

Answer 1

Couple of days later and I've tried out lumberjack..
The good news is that it works, but as usual there's several serious issues to consider..
Lumberjack obivously needs to use the same package (java.util.logging) as the logging API, which prevents developers from loading the jar normally at which point you get java.lang.SecurityException: Prohibited package name. The release note suggest a couple of ways around this but basically consist of adding lumberjack to the bootclasspath: -Xbootclasspath/a:./jars/logging.jar
I had to problems here, this means I can't use webstart because it doesn't allow changes to these jre parameters and runs fowl of the sun licence, to quote from the tool docs:
"-Xbootclasspath/p:path
Specify a semicolon-separated path of directories, JAR archives, and ZIP archives to prepend in front of the default bootstrap class path. Note: Applications that use this option for the purpose of overriding a class in rt.jar should not be deployed as doing so would contravene the Java 2 Runtime Environment binary code license."
The second problem I had was with the loading of the logging.properties file, which needs to sit under the jre/lib directory; obviously it isn't present under jdk1.3, 1.2 so either you need make a copy there; or override it's location by changing the java.util.logging.config.file.
Primarly because of the licence issues, this means that I can't honestly use the java.util.logging package and expect cross compatibilty - so my only realistic option is to forget it and use something like apache Log4j instead which works under the full jre gamut..
Wasted a lot of time over this, hope this helps anybody else from making the same mistakes.
Richard Oz