Apache Commons Logging (ACL) is a nice idea when you first stumble upon it:
Develop your app using commons logging, use whatever logging backend you want to use and let the guy deploying decide what he wants to use for logging.
So far so good. I liked the idea. We are using commons logging all over the place.
Now reality hits.
Two weeks ago we started a new project. This time we wanted to do everything right and wanted to get all logging centralized. Piece of cake when everybody is using it ... which is simply not the case.
Having tons of open source libraries in there we finally had to realize that not all coders bought into the idea of ACL. Which is perfectly understandable as it adds another layer to your logging, another jar to the classpath and it takes away the logging interface you came to love over the years.
People use ACL, log4J and *shudders* Java-Logging. How do you handle that?
A while ago I read a post about a new logging wrapper. The post was incredibly misleading and bad researched so I almost dismissed slf4j. Thankfully I looked again.
slf4j was actually what we needed.
So what does it do?
It's quite simple:
It's a log syndication tool. It just collects logging output from all kinds of different sources and redirects it to your logge rof choice.
Awesome, finally someone got it right.
Using it in OSGi makes my life a lot easier. Using OSGi I could sneak in the replacements for org.apache.commons into all libraries and could also catch logging output from all other sources.
Give it a shot and please, remove ACL from your project, it's a waste of time and space.
Develop your app using commons logging, use whatever logging backend you want to use and let the guy deploying decide what he wants to use for logging.
So far so good. I liked the idea. We are using commons logging all over the place.
Now reality hits.
Two weeks ago we started a new project. This time we wanted to do everything right and wanted to get all logging centralized. Piece of cake when everybody is using it ... which is simply not the case.
Having tons of open source libraries in there we finally had to realize that not all coders bought into the idea of ACL. Which is perfectly understandable as it adds another layer to your logging, another jar to the classpath and it takes away the logging interface you came to love over the years.
People use ACL, log4J and *shudders* Java-Logging. How do you handle that?
A while ago I read a post about a new logging wrapper. The post was incredibly misleading and bad researched so I almost dismissed slf4j. Thankfully I looked again.
slf4j was actually what we needed.
So what does it do?
It's quite simple:
It's a log syndication tool. It just collects logging output from all kinds of different sources and redirects it to your logge rof choice.
Awesome, finally someone got it right.
Using it in OSGi makes my life a lot easier. Using OSGi I could sneak in the replacements for org.apache.commons into all libraries and could also catch logging output from all other sources.
Give it a shot and please, remove ACL from your project, it's a waste of time and space.
Posts
