Hi all, I looked at the svn of Log4J and saw that there is no activity on the 2.0 branch for 17 months. It seems that the 2.0 effort has been stopped 3 months after the failure of 1.3. On the 1.2 trunk Curt is still doing a great job with fixing bugs and caring about a new release. But it seems that he is rather alone with Scott. It also feels that Log4J is not having big step forwards, its more in a maintenance mode. And I am wondering why, because Log4J is still one of the most used frameworks for logging in most projects I know.
However, I also looked into the code. With my experience I took with me with developing Log4PHP (which was quite near to the architecture of Log4J) I spotted out the project. I feel that Log4J needs much bigger steps now. It looks like outdated syntax which has been written for old versions of the JDK, very complex design (lots of extensions, deprecations and so on) and a very weird code format. I think there can be done much more as JDKs have progressed. Since there is less activity at all, I would like to know about your thoughts on the future development. I saw no posts at this topic at all. However, I strongly believe that with cleaning up Log4J lots could be won. I don't want to to step on anybodys tooth, but I think the project needs to refactor it's stuff, not caring about backwards compatiblity. Clean up the old deprecations and everything which was necessary to keep performance on old JDKs, but no longer. I am thinking on renaming packages to better names. Not longer "or" but maybe "renderers". Then there are much different classes stored in the same directory, which makes everything hard to understand. Please have a look in the log4php package structure to see what I mean. On first glance, I don't see why Category.java is necesary any longer. In a local version I have done these two steps and it looks so much better so far :-) Similar approach can help with removing classes like PropertyGetter.java. After that kind of clean up and refactoring, it should be quite easy to attract new developers and have new features on board. Again, I didn't want to step on anybody tooth, but I would like to see a new step in Log4J. Otherwise I am afraid this project is going more and more into maintenance mode, until it reaches the end of its lifecycle. And that would be too bad! Of course I am willing to contribute my changes or send it to any interested party as a zip file. But be warned, junit is not running smoothly atm :-) I am also willing to get my hands on. Cheers, Christian
