Christopher Judd

Try looking at http://mx4j.sourceforge.net/

I have been using Spring and Hibernate for the last 6 months. Recently I have also started using OJB. At this point, I can not immagine developing with out Spring and at least Hibernate or OJB.

Sorry, I have not been following Mono very closely. Following Java and all the open source Java projects takes all my free time. Well Java and my cute 6 month old son.

I recommend you start with the article Building Flexible Logs With log4j by Vikram Goyal

Just because you use one open source project it does not mean everything has to be open source. For example, my last project we used Weblogic and SQL Server which are commercial and we used the following open source ANT, Struts, commons logging, Log4j, FOP, JUnit, Jakarta JSTL, commons validator, commons collection, oscache, axis, poi, hibernate, xdoclet and emma.

On my current project, I am using WAS and DB2 which are commercial and the following open source ANT, Spring, Hibernate or OJB, commons logging and Log4j. The open source list is likely to grow.

Sorry, I missed the word framework following light. See the
What's missing thread to see what Brian and I would like to include in a second edition or second volumne if we get the chance. Spring and light weight containers would definatly be included.

No single book can do justice to every enterprise open source project/framework. So, if you goal is to become an expert on a particular project/framework such as Struts, our book is not for you. However, if you want to lean what is available, how to fit it together, challenges you might encounter, good design patterns to use, how to architect and design enterprise systems without breaking a budget then our book is for you.

What Java Open Source Web Sites do you use to keep up to date? I frequenly visit the following sites.

http://www.java-source.net
http://www.apache.org/
http://www.codehaus.org/
http://www.objectweb.org/
http://sourceforge.net/index.php

The JDBCAppender is the one with the bugs. But I extended that and fixed the bugs by overriding the buggy methods and then added JNDI support.

I'm now already wanting a volume 2.

Brian, we need to talk to our editor. They want more.

This topic is such an overwhelming topic because there are so many great projects and it always changing. I bet if Brian and I were to start writing this book today, it would be a completely different book. Just because we are aware of new and different projects then we were then. For example, Spring was not even on our radar then but is a critical part of what I do on a daily bases now.

We are also missing profiling and load testing. I have yet to find open source load tester that are of the same quality of OptimizeIt, JProbe or ServerTrace. If you know of any please share.

I am not sure what you are referring to as light weight frameworks. But we cover, JUnit, Cactus and DBUnit.

the major limitation of open source solutions is that they are not appropriate for clustered server environments and they don't scale well.

Funny you should give the example of Tomcat because I thought it was the web container built into WSAD and I know it is the web container in Borland App Server. If you want clustering and open source you might want to look at JBoss.

it's possible build applications using Eclipse/Ant and then deploy to WebSphere but it's a lot harder.

I disagree that it is harder. But there are some really good reasons why in a large team you should have a ANT script for building your project even if you are using WSAD and WAS. An ANT script provides a repeatable and automatable process (continues integration). It also enables large teams to have a designated build master who does not need an expensive WSAD license just to run a build.

In the past, I have written an appender that logs to a database. The one included with Log4j has several bugs and a major problem in that it does not support JNDI.

Using a database appender has several advantages. First, it solves the problem of having log files on different machines. Second, it makes searching and evaluating the logs really easy since you can use standard SQL to filter and locate messages.