Hello John,
You are obviously a few steps ahead of me. I'll try to answer when I can,
and ask questions otherwise.
More in line.
At 09:07 PM 11/22/2005, John Franey wrote:
Hi,
I've created a logging prototype in the Eclipse rich client platform using
slf4j and nlog4j. I've written an article about it which is in its final
draft. I'm about to submit it to the editors of EclipseZone
(http:www.eclipsezone.com), but there are some questions I'd like to ask
your development team.
I hope they accept your submission. However, regardless of their decision,
I suggest that you ask to keep the copyright so that you can publish its
contents elsewhere. In my experience, the publicity spurt that an article
in a magazine brings is not worth the steady diffusion power of the article
published on the web-pages of your project. Most magazine editors (but not
book editors) will let you keep the copyright. In short, you license your
article to the magazine but keep the copyright.
In the article, Eclipse plug-ins for the slf4j class libraries are created
and introduced; one plug-in for each slf4j variant. These plug-ins are
interchangeable and so allows seperation between the application and
logging framework. Also, because slf4j contains a JCL implementation, the
slf4j plug-ins can support other plug-ins that use JCL. Way cool. Thanks
for the library.
I am not familiar with Eclipse plug-ins (except as an Eclipse user). What
advantages does the plug-in form SLF4J have compared to the stand-alone
form? I apologize if this may seem like a stupid question.
First question: The name of the plug-ins incorporate the name of your
organization: org.slf4j. Is this OK? Its a naming convention in Eclipse
plug-ins; to name a plug-in after the java package that it
implements. For example, a plug-in for LOG4J logging would be called
org.apache.log4j. Also, 99.9% of the code in the plug-in originates from
slf4j, not any other entity. The only code that I provide are entries to
a jar's MANIFEST.MF file.
The SLF4J is distributed under the X11 license (see
http://www.slf4j.org/license.html ) which is quite permissive. In short,
provided that:
the copyright notice(s) and this permission notice appear in all copies of
the Software and that both the above copyright notice(s) and this
permission notice appear in supporting documentation.
You should be fine.
Second question: Its very easy for you to build and distribute your
library as Eclipse plug-ins, incorporating the modifications detailed in
the article. It requires only OSGi entries in the jar file's
MANIFEST.MF. Would you be interested in doing this?
Why not? However, as mentioned above, the advantages of distributing SLF4J
as Eclipse plug-ins are not entirely obvious to me :-).
Third question: I created a plug-in for an slf4j Logger implementation
over the Eclipse RCP logging framework. I used org.slf4j in the name of
the plug-in only to keep it consistent with the other plug-in names in the
article. Is that OK? Only the Logger, LoggerFactory and binding classes
are contributed by me, the rest of the code is all yours and I'd like to
maintain that credit belongs to you.
Although you do not have to, you could license the code to slf4j.org so
that it could distribute your code. Alternatively, you could chose to
distribute your code on your own.
Fourth question: Could I contribute the slf4j on Eclipse logging to your
project? One objection you may have is that there are build time
dependencies on the Eclipse RCP libraries.
The Eclipse RCP library dependency is not a problem. In principle, each
binding already depends on some underlying library, e.g. log4j.
Dependencies on logging systems is what SLF4J is all about.
Let me contact you offline for details about creating an account for you,
commit rights etc on the slf4j.org server.
Thanks,
John
--
Ceki Gülcü
The complete log4j manual: http://www.qos.ch/log4j/
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