you can use your own log4j.jar in your own web application's WEB-INF/lib for logging your own web application's messages to wherever you want via whatever Appenders you want.



I think the Websphere server itself uses IBM's own implementation of Apache Commons Logging, not log4j.... if your client code uses the Commons Logging API instead of log4j, you'll get stuck with Websphere's own Commons Logging, unless you disable it....



there's some documentation at IBM (search there) on how to disable it, how to put 2 commons logging properties files in your web application's WAR file to tell it that the Commons Logging should use your log4j, not IBM's own.
I forget but I think one file needs to go in the WEB-INF/classes and the other file needs to go in a subdir under META-INF