I am not sure whether this is a Tomcat problem or 
a j2eeserver problem. Filing it with j2eeserver 
for now. 

1) The context log is more interesting to the 
developer than the server log. If we can only show 
one, then the context log and not the server log 
should be shown in the output tab. 

2) The UI for accessing the context log is 
unintuitive. 

First issue: 

The output tab shows Tomcat's server log. It used 
to show the log file for the context that the user 
was executing also. If the user has written the 
application properly, they use

getServletContext.log("Message")

and not 

System.out.... 

On Tomcat system.out type calls go to the server 
log (the one that is shown). Any logging messages 
from the source code (if properly written) go to 
the context log, and so do any messages from the 
source itself. So if there is an exception in a 
tag handler for example, this will be logged to 
the context log. 

It is possible to view the context log from the 
server registration tab, but since it comes up 
through the editor and hence doesn't scroll to 
follow the execution, it is not as useful. Hence, 
accessing the log file this way does *not* provide 
equivalent functionality to putting it on the 
output tab. Developers will have to resort to 
running tail -f externally, since access to this 
file is pretty crucial. 

Second issue: 

When I looked for access to the context logs, I 
went to the server registry and browsed down to 
the individual context log I was interested in. 
There is no such item in the context sensitive 
menu. 

Instead, there is a "view context log" item at the 
server level, which doesn't make much sense from a 
UI point of view. Tomcat is configurable, and I 
don't know why we switched from individual context 
logs to mixed once - perhaps the defaults in 
Tomcat changed (?) but I don't see how this 
improves things for the users. Surely, if the user 
cares about more than one web module at the same 
time, they're better served if the data is 
separate? 

As long as we use the term "context" log I expect 
it at the level of the context in the UI. 
Otherwise, the action should be named "log for all 
contexts" or something like that.