I am going to be creating a logging service. The architecture in our POC is the client uses the JMSTopicAppender writing to ActiveMQ and then the service will listen on the topic and write to the destination. To avoid having the messages be logback specific so that our legacy system can also interact with this I will be serializing the messages according the the IETFSyslogLayout in my fork of Logback (i.e. all the messages will comply with RFC 5424). I got this working today with the output temporarily going to syslog-ng (which supports IETF syslog messages). Of Course, JMSTopicAppender and JMSQueueAppender had to be modified to allow a different form of serialization. This was easily done by just seeing if a layout was configured. If so, then LayoutPreSerializationTransformer is used instead of LoggingEventPreSerializationTransformer. However, just for fun I tried serializing to LoggingEventVO using the default mechanisms in place and sending that through the JMS Appender to the JMSTopicSink. It didn't quite work correctly. In looking at why I discovered the LoggingEventVO serializes arguments by calling toString(). So when the JMSAppender transforms the objects their object type is lost. This means on the remote side it is impossible to convert them back to the original object. I would think that some form of the Serialized object should be in the argument array instead of just a String. Otherwise it is impossible to get the remote side to behave like the original client. Ralph