What's your distro?

Another reliable solution is daemontools.  It essentially daemonizes the jar while also restarting the service if it happens to die, and it comes with flexible logging options.

http://isotope11.com/blog/manage-your-services-wit...

Here are the two scripts I use to set up my service:

#!/bin/sh
#/etc/service/ubooquity/run

cd /opt/ubooquity/
exec 2>&1
exec java -jar /opt/ubooquity/Ubooquity.jar -webadmin -headless

#!/bin/sh
#/etc/service/ubooquity/log/run

exec multilog s10485760 n5 /var/log/ubooquity

The ubooquity/run script is set up to always run from /opt/ubooquity to keep the database in one place and also combines STDERR with STDOUT for logging.  The ubooquity/log/run script rotates the log after 10MB and retains 5 previous.