This feature will provide support for configuring a socket server in logback.xml, thus allowing any LoggerContext to be a receiver for remote log events. This approach provides better configurability than the simple command line approach used in SimpleSocketServer, and is especially useful when using SSL, as there are many more configurable properties.

This will require a new socket server implementation. The existing SimpleSocketServer depends on having a fully configured LoggerContext available at the time it is created. However, if the socket server is created during JoranConfigurator.doConfigure, the LoggerContext might not be ready to receive logging events from remote loggers. The new socket server implementation will allow late resolution of the target LoggerContext for the logger events received from remote loggers.

This feature will require documentation updates, but it is not completely clear where the documentation belongs – it does not seem to fit any of the existing chapters of the logback manual.

I will provide pull requests for the implementation.