Tutorials : Enterprise Logging for Distributed J2EE Applications :

Enterprise Logging for Distributed J2EE Applications

by Venkatray Kamath

As more and more enterprise applications are architected using the paradigm of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), new challenges surface at every stage of an application's evolution. One such challenge is the consistent requirement of application logging. While the very distributed nature of SOA systems complicate trouble-shooting, log files can come to your rescue when trying to understand a system's behavior. This article discusses our experience implementing logging in a Loan Origination System (LOS), built using SOA on the J2EE platform. Along the way, we hope to answer the following questions:

1. How do you trace requests through Web-tier and business-tier logs in a distributed J2EE deployment model?
2. In case of an application error, how does the end user report the problem to help desk and subsequently how does the development team correlate the reported error and troubleshoot the issue with the help of application logs.

Prerequisites

• J2EE
• Log4j
• AOP and AspectJ

Definitions, Acronyms, and Abbreviations

You'll also need to be familiar with these terms in order to understand this article:

Web Tier	The servlet container in which JSPs and servlets get executed.
Business Tier	This tier deploys the EJB components that provide application services requested by components in the Web tier.
J2EE	Java Version 2 Enterprise Edition as specified by Sun Microsystems
SOA	An architecture pattern, Service Oriented Architecture
SC	Service Component Ex. Loan Manager, Strip Engine
LRID	Log Reference ID, a unique value
MDC	Mapped Diagnostic Contexts
RMI	Remote Method Invocation
AOP	Aspect Oriented Programming
AspectJ	AspectJ is an implementation of aspect-oriented programming for Java

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