In the beginning there was System.out.println(). Or, for those of us who were purists (or wanted our output immediately), System.err.println(). And every developer had his or her own preferences for how their log messages would appear, leading to some very messy output as the number of developers on a team increased.
To bring order to this chaos, many projects implemented their own logging framework. I worked on one such project in the late 90s: the framework consisted of a single class that implemented a static log() method. I can't remember what the logging output looked like, but I suspect that it included a consistently-formatted timestamp.
According to this article by Ceki Gülcü, a project that he was working on in 1996 also implemented their own logging framework. But unlike the project I worked on, its framework was released to the public in 1999 as Log4J.
Something else that became public in 1999 was the Jakarta project, a collaboration between Sun and the Apache Software Foundation to produce the Tomcat application server. And of course Tomcat, being a large application with contributions by many people, had its own logging framework (and it still does, although the implementation and purpose has changed over time).
And lastly, 1999 was also the year that JSR 047, the Java Logging API Specification, was released. It turned into the java.util.logging (JUL) package, released as part of JDK 1.4 in 2002.
A plethora of logging frameworks isn't a problem if you're an application developer: you pick one and stick with it. If you're developing a library that might be used by those applications, however, it's a nightmare. If your library uses Log4J and the application uses JUL, then the output becomes a mess and the developers using your library complain.
At the time, the Jakarta project was arguably the largest single producer of libraries for Java application developers, so they added another: Jakarta Commons Logging (since renamed to Apache Commons Logging, but you'll still see the initials "JCL" in the documentation). The idea of Commons Logging was that you would write your code against the JCL API, add the JCL JAR to your dependencies, and it would figure out what actual logging framework you were using.
Although Commons Logging was intended for libraries, application developers adopted it as well. I can't speak for anyone else, but I looked at it as “won't hurt, and means I don't need to keep track of multiple APIs.” Unfortunately, some developers discovered that it could hurt: they were using Tomcat, regularly redeploying their applications, and had memory leaks that would eventually cause Tomcat to stop working.
Looking back, it appears that these leaks were due to missing transitive dependencies in the deployment bundle.* This took place in the days before Maven 2, when developers were responsible for identifying every JAR that went into their application, and ensuring that it somehow got there (which often meant lots of JARs checked into source control). It wouldn't be obvious that a library used Commons Logging, so the application developer wouldn't bother to add it to the deployed WAR. Unfortunately, Tomcat made it available on the system classpath (because it used Commons Logging internally), so the developers never knew they were missing the JAR. And since Commons Logging needed to know about the actual deployed logging framework, it would establish a strong reference to the Log4J implementation that was in the WAR, preventing the classloader from unloading the classes belonging to the WAR.
That problem was rather quickly resolved: Commons Logging version 1.1 was released in 2006, Tomcat 6 moved it off the public classpath (although Tomcat 5 remained “in the wild” for quite some time), and Maven 2 ensured that a WAR would contain all of the dependencies that it needed. But developers have very long memories for things that go wrong, especially things that happened to someone else who blogged about it.**
At the same time, several popular Java frameworks appeared; Hibernate in 2001 and Spring in 2002 are two of the most familiar. These frameworks were complex enough to need logging, but for obvious reasons wouldn't want to be tied to a specific implementation. Commons Logging provided that capability (and thus became an untracked dependency for many builds).
Moving forward, the new millennium saw continued change in the logging world. Log4J became an Apache project. Ceki Gülcü left Apache and developed Logback and SLF4J. And in the early 2010s, the remaining Apache Log4J committers decided that the Log4J 1.x implementation couldn't be extended and completely rewrote it as Log4J 2.x.
Of these, SLF4J is particularly interesting because it was a logging facade, in direct competition with Commons Logging. Unlike Commons Logging, which tried to infer what underlying framework you were using, SLF4J required you to explicitly include “bridge” JARs for your actual implementation. SLF4J also provided additional features, such as formatted log messages, that were very attractive to application developers.
However, adopting SLF4J had its own pain point: if you used Spring (or Hibernate, or any other library that dependent on Commons Logging), Maven would add it to your build as a transitive dependency. Where it might take precedence over the “slf4j-jcl” bridge from SLF4J (it all depended on the order that JARs were given to the classloader). A key feature of Maven POMs from this era are multiple <exclusions> to prevent such transitive dependencies.
So here we are in 2020, and the logging frameworks scene is more complex than ever:
- Log4J 1.x is still used by many projects, even though it was officially end-of-lifed in 2015. One of its most useful features doesn't work under Java 9 (and, I presume, later versions), so its popularity may fade (although it seems that many people, particularly those using OpenJDK, are quite happy with Java 8).
- SLF4J/Logback is still used by many developers (including myself), even though new releases seem to have stalled at the 1.3.0-alpha stage (after 25 years of writing logging frameworks, I'm guessing Ceki is in need of a break).
- Log4J 2.x provides “bridge” JARs that let people use Commons Logging and SLF4J as their API, with Log4J2 as the back-end.
- Commons Logging still exists, but hasn't seen a release since 2014. Nor has its list of supported frameworks changed: Log4J 1.x, JUL, and Avalon LogKit.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, even with all of these changes, Commons Logging is still used by many libraries. However, it's become less visible. Spring Framework, for example, implements the API internally; as an application developer, you no longer need to explicitly exclude the JAR. And if you use Spring Boot, its a 3,000+ line dependency-management POM will explicitly exclude Commons Logging from the libraries that use it.
If you're developing a library, I think that Commons Logging is still the best choice for internal logging. It provides a consistent interface, and it's reasonable to expect that the consumers of your library already have the bridge JARs that they need (which might mean the internal implementation in Spring Framework). But there are a few best practices to keep your users from cursing you:
- Mark your dependency as
provided. This tells Maven (or Gradle, or any of the other tools that follow the Maven standard) not to resolve the transitive dependency; it will rely instead on an explicitly-referenced JAR to provide the necessary classes. - Ensure that you don't establish a transitive dependency via a package that you depend on, like HTTP Components. Take the time to look at your entire dependency tree (using
mvn dependency:treeor equivalent), and add an exclusion if anything tries to pull in Commons Logging. - Don't implement your own logging facade. It's tempting, I know: you want to protect the people that haven't configured logging into their application. And it seems easy: two classes (a log factory and a logger), with some reflection to pick an appropriate back end. But there's a lot of room for error. If you get it wrong, you'll introduce subtle bugs and performance issues, and your experienced users will curse you (and look for an alternative library). And if you get it right, you'll find that you've re-implemented Commons Logging. And good or bad, it won't actually help inexperienced users: they should learn to use logging rather than deploy a black box and cross their fingers.
Bottom line: if you're writing an application, use whatever logging framework you want. I have a strong preference for SLF4J/Logback, but Log4J 2.x does have some features that it's missing. However, if you're implementing a library, stick with Commons Logging. In almost every case it will Just Work™.
* Open Source Archaeology can be a fascinating experience. It's next to impossible to find a source-code repository that gives a full history for older projects: they typically started on CVS, then moved to SVN, and are now on GIT. In some cases, moving between hosting providers (although it looks like Hibernate is still actively maintained on SourceForge, which makes me feel better about a couple of my older projects). Each move lost information such as version tags (assuming they ever existed).
Maven Central is also less helpful than expected, because many projects changed their group or artifact IDs over their lifetime (plus, who wants to dig through 55 pages of org.springframework JAR listings). And a lot of older versions are “retconned”: they were imported into the repository long after release, with a made-up, minimal POM.
Fortunately, most of the larger projects maintain their own archives, so you can download a particular version and unpack it to see what's there. And if you're looking for dependencies, you can pick a likely class and run javap -c to disassemble it and then look at variable declarations. It's a lot of work, and some might call it obsessive. But that's how I learned that Spring Framework 1.0 didn't log at all, while 1.2 used Commons Logging.
** They're also very vocal about it. I wrote an article on logging techniques in 2008 that referenced Commons Logging (because in my world it wasn't an issue), and constantly received comments telling me that it was horrible and should never be used. I eventually updated the article to reference SLF4J, primarily because it was focused at application logging, but also to keep the critics quiet.
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