LOGBack is intended as a successor to the popular log4j project. It was designed, in addition to many individual contributors, by Ceki Gülcü, the founder of log4j. It builds upon experience gained in building industrial-strength logging systems going back as far as 1999. The logback-classic module can be assimilated to a significantly improved version of log4j. Moreover, logback-classic natively implements the SLF4J API (Simple Logging Facade for Java) so that you can readily switch back and forth between logback and other logging frameworks such as log4j or java.util.logging (JUL). Amongst others Logback provides appenders for files, SMTP, databases and JMS.

Alternative

Even though log4j hasn't had a new release since August 2007 it is most widely used logging framework and has a large number of extensions. It is, however, quite easy to migrate log4j layouts and appenders to LOGBack.