The beauty of Log4J

It took me sometime to appreciate the inheritance heirarchy in Log4J. It's quite simple to understand the Log Levels and their usage.

It is because of this heirarchy that we can have any arbitraty level of granularity in logging. For e.g. suppose we have 10 components in a distributed environment and we want to shutdown the logging of one component. This can be easily done in Log4J using config files. We can also disable logging at a class level - provided we have a Logger for that class - using the Logger.getLogger(this.class) method. Another example is if U want to switch off logging of one or more modules in a application.

We can even make dymanic changes in the configuration file at runtime and these changes would get reflected provided we have used the configureAndWatch() method.