Hi, We've done the servlet that reloads the log4j thing in the past: it works well,
and there's one for your use in the log4j-sandbox.

In the J2EE Spec world (which as others point out has serious limitations in
this area), the thread creation itself is just as much a problem as the lack of
a shutdown method. It's simply against the spec, so technical if you do it your
app isn't J2EE-compliant ;) Of course, in practice everyone does it all the time
in all the containers, but the user originally did ask for the strict spec take
on this.

Ceki's absolutely right that the lack of a clean shutdown for configureAndWatch
leads to bad situations with webapp reloads: we see such questions posted almost
daily on the tomcat mailing lists. One suggested solution is to take log4j's
watchdog class (in the helper package), extend it with a nice shutdown method,
and keep a referece to it in your ServletContextListener. Then you can at least
shut it down cleanly and not affect webapp reloads.

Yoav Shapira Millennium Research Informatics