A History of Java Logging Frameworks, or, Why Commons-Logging is Still So Common

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:tree or 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™.

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* 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.

The Future of Open Source

The world of open source software seems to be going through a period of soul-searching. On the one hand, individual maintainers have retracted packages, causing disruption for the communities that depended on those packages. On the other, software-as-a-service providers are making more money from some applications than their creators.

This is all happening in a world where businesses depend on open-source to operate. It doesn't matter whether you're an individual launching a startup with PHP and MySQL, or a multi-national replacing your mainframe with a fleet of Linux boxes running Java. Your business depends on the work of people that have their own motivations, and those motivations may not align with yours. I think this is an untenable situation, one that will eventually resolve by changing the nature of open-source.

Before looking at how I think it will resolve, I want to give some historical perspective. This is one person's view; you may not agree with it.

I date the beginning of “professional” open source as March 1985: that was the month that Dr Dobbs published an article by Richard Stallman, an article that would turn into the GNU Manifesto. There was plenty of freely available software published prior to that time; my experience was with the Digital Equipment Corporation User Society (DECUS), which published an annual catalog of programs ranging in complexity from fast fourier transform routines to complete language implementations. These came with source code and no copyright attached (or, at least, no registered copyright, which was an important distinction in the 1970s and early 1980s).

What was different about the GNU Manifesto, and why I refer to it as the start of “professional” open source, was that Stallman set out a vision of how programmers could make money when they gave away their software. In his view, companies would get software for free but then hire programmers to maintain and enhance it.

In 1989, Stallman backed up the ideas of the GNU Manifesto with the Gnu Public License (GPL), which was applied to the software produced by the GNU project. This licence introduced the idea of “copyleft”: a requirement that any “derivative works” also be licensed using the GPL, meaning that software developers could not restrict access to their code. Even though that requirement was relaxed in 1991 with the “library” (now “lesser”) license, meaning that you could use the GNU C compiler to compile your programs without them becoming open source by that act, the GPL scared most corporations away from any use of the GNU tools (as late as 1999, I was met with a look of shock when I suggested that the GNU C compiler could make our multi-platform application easier to manage).

In my opinion, it was the Apache web server, introduced in 1995, that made open-source palatable (or at least acceptable) to the corporate world. In large part, this was due to the Apache license, which essentially said “do what you want, but don't blame us if anything goes wrong.” But also, I think it was because the corporate world was completely unprepared for the web. To give a sense of how quickly things moved: in 1989 I helped set up the DNS infrastructure for a major division of one of the world's largest corporations; I had only a few years of experience with TCP/IP networking, but it was more than the IT team. NCSA Mosaic appeared four years later, and within a year or two after that companies were scrambling to create a web presence. Much like the introduction of PCs ten years earlier, this happened outside of corporate IT; while there were commercial web-servers (including Microsoft and Netscape), “free as in beer” was a strong incentive.

Linux, of course, was a thing in the late 1990s, but in my experience wasn't used outside of a hobbyist community; corporations that wanted UNIX used a commercial distribution. In my view, Linux became popular due to two things: first, Eric Raymond published The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997, which made the case that open source was actually better than commercial systems: it has to be good to survive. But also, after the dot-com crash, “free as in beer” became a selling point, especially to the startups that would create “Web 2.0”

Jumping forward 20 years, open-source software is firmly embedded in the corporate world. While I'm an oddity for running Linux on the desktop, all of the companies I've worked with in the last ten or more years used it for their production deployments. And not just Linux; the most popular database systems are open source, as are the tools to provision and manage servers, and even productivity tools such as LibreOffice. And for most of the users of these tools, “free as in beer” is an important consideration.

But stability is (or should be) another important consideration, and I think that many open-source consumers have been lulled into a false sense of stability. The large projects, such as GNU and Apache, have their own repositories and aren't going anywhere. And the early “public” repositories, such as SourceForge and Maven Central, adopted a policy that “once you publish something here, it will never go away.” But newer repositories don't have such a policy, and as we saw with left-pad in 2016 and chef-sugar in 2019, authors are willing and able to pull their work down.

At the same time, companies such as Mongo and Elastic.NV found that releasing their core products as open-source might not have been such a great idea. Software-as-a-service companies such as AWS are able to take those products and host them as a paid service, often making more money from the hosting than the original companies do from the services they offer around the product. And in response, the product companies have changed the license on their software, attempting to cut off that usage (or at least capture a share of it).

Looking at both behaviors, I can't help but think that one of the core tenets of the GNU manifesto has been forgotten: that the developers of open-source software do not have the right to control its use. Indeed, the Manifesto is quite clear on this point: “[programmers] deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.”

You may or may not agree with that idea. I personally believe that creators have the right to decide how their work is used. But I also believe that releasing your work under an open-source license is a commitment, one that can't be retracted.

Regardless of any philosophical view on the matter, I think there are two practical outcomes.

The first is that companies — or development teams — that depend on open-source software need to ensure their continued access to that software. Nearly eight years ago I wrote about using a local repository server when working with Maven and Java. At the time I was focused on coordination between different development teams at the same company. If I were to rewrite the post today, it would focus on using the local server to ensure that you always have access to your dependencies.

A second, and less happy change, is that I think open-source creators will lose the ability to control their work. One way this will happen is for companies whose products are dependent on open-source to provide their own public repositories — indeed, I'm rather amazed that Chef doesn't offer such a repository (although perhaps they're gun-shy after the reaction to their hamfisted attempt to redistributed chef-sugar).

The other way this will happen is for service-provider companies to fork open-source projects and maintain their own versions. Amazon has already done this, for Elasticsearch and also OpenJDK; I don't expect them to be the only company to do so. While these actions may damage the companies' reputations within a small community of open-source enthusiasts, the much larger community of their clients will applaud those actions. I can't imagine there are many development teams that will say “we're going to self-host Elasticsearch as an act of solidarity”; convenience will always win out.

If you're like me, a person responsible for a few niche open-source projects, this probably won't matter: nobody's going to care about your library (although note that both left-pad and chef-sugar at least started out single-maintainer niche projects). But if you're a company that is planning to release your core product as open-source, you should think long and hard about why you want to do this, and whether your plan to make money is viable. And remember these words from the GNU Manifesto: “programming will not be as lucrative on the new basis as it is now.”

Calculators

I recently sold three calculators on eBay: an HP15C, an HP16C, and a TI59. Got slightly over $300 for them, which was less than I paid 30-plus years ago (especially adjusted for inflation), but they had no value sitting on a shelf in my office. Along the way, I realized two things.

First, I was, and may still be, a calculator geek.

I was never one of those people that walked around with his calculator on his belt (indeed, only one of the three even had a case with a belt loop). But, let's be honest, owning a dozen calculators just ain't normal (no, I didn't sell all of my old calculators; sue me). Nor is it normal for a 15-year-old to save his allowance and odd-job money so that he could buy a programmable calculator (a TI-55, which I still have; again, sue me).

The second thing I realized is just how irrelevant calculators are today.

These three calculators were the pinnacle of late-70s/early-80s calculator design. All three were programmable. The HP15 was designed for engineers: it could work with complex numbers, and could compute integrals and roots based on your programmed function. The TI-59, with nearly 1 KB (!) of memory and a magnetic card reader, was a viable competitor for then-current home computers, at 1/10th the price (and was touted as such in contemporary reviews). Certainly I used it as such: looking over my personal program card library, I saw one card that I used to balance my checkbook, tracking credits and debits.

But as desktop computers became more prevalent, nobody needed programmable calculators. In the early 90s I bought what I still consider to be HP's best calculator, the HP27S. It wasn't programmable, but you could still find the root of a function: you simply entered it as a formula and the calculator was smart enough to either solve it algebraically or numerically. It also combined functionality from the financial and computing domains with the basic scientific functions. And it used algebraic notation, which I'm sure upset a lot of HP purists.

I first got a hint of how irrelevant the physical devices had become a few years ago, when I was doing some bit manipulation operations and took out my 16C. When I learned that a new set of batteries would cost $15, I looked for something similar that I could run on my phone. And found apps that were based on the actual HP ROMs (they weren't copyrighted), running on an emulator. For less than the cost of batteries.

So the actual calculator remained on a shelf, unused. And really, I don't use the apps that much either (I also downloaded an HP11 emulation, so plural). When sitting at the computer it's easier to start up a Python shell or a spreadsheet. Really, the only place that I use the calculator is when I'm at Home Depot trying to figure out how many bags of fertilizer I need.

Perhaps high school and college students still use calculators, but I suspect not. Laptops are pervasive and inexpensive; why carry two devices. Which makes me wonder: will the calculators I sold sit unused on the shelf of someone who's more of a calculator geek than me?