I had always thought so but in the last week I’ve concluded with dynamite determination that logging abstraction is completely pointless. No. Benefit. Whatsoever. Could I be mistaken? No, if anything you’re probably still hanging on to Commons Logging because somebody told you how great it was, I don’t think anyone in their right mind would, after taking a step back and looking at the circumstances say, Hmmm, I really need to be careful and not commit myself to Log4J because God knows when Mark Womack and his team might pack it in and leave me hangin’. The same people who name their first born after Commons Logging classes commit themselves to products like IText, JFreeChart and GodKnowsWhat without ever thinking about abstraction. Raise your hand if you’re ever used IText and considered what happens if you want to switch your PDF generation tool? Nobody? So why the hell do we care so much about logging?
Luckily the answer is as simple as it is stupid: making a logging tool is so freaking easy that everybody’s got a homegrown one which they swear by and would never ditch even if they were offered ass in return (this just in, Logger just won the most used classname ever, it beat out Tester). So instead they use Commons Logging which gives them the feeling of not being such a big idiot with the added bonus of sleeping well at night knowing that they could eaaaasily switch to Log4J if they wanted to. What these poor saps don’t know is that switching between logging tools isn’t even that easy regardless of the abstraction, you still have to worry about configuring your tool which is a major pain in the ass if you want to actually stick to the proper log levels. Besides, nobody’s switching to anything, once you pick a logging framework you stick with it until the application is dead. Period. No exceptions. And if you happen to be switching your logging implementation so frequently that you need abstraction you suck at design and product evaluation.
Do you really care which of the two following imports you’d rather have shit on your code: org.apache.commons.logging or org.apache.log4j. Unless you have a thing for using commons packages (and some people do) you probably don’t give a rats ass. So with that in mind why don’t we save ourselves some trouble and just use Log4J, and as a bonus I’ll throw in the pro of Tomcat not barfing every time it sees two commons logging jars in its classpath, God forbid if they’re two different versions because then it starts giving you errors that make you regret ever even getting into Java.
The only way to beat Log4J is to have something out of the ever so trustworthy java.* packages do the logging for you. Luckily there’s JULI which is really great but unfortunately it’s documented about as poorly as Guice and isn’t marketed nearly as aggressively as that retard Duke (I really hate that son of a bitch, looks like a tooth with a big cavity). Besides, anytime anyone asks you to modify something in the JAVA_HOME directory to configure something red flags go up. Somebody please document how to load a config file from your classpath without specifying a -D option in JAVA_OPTS. I mean I’m configuring logging, not optimizing my garbage collection, yeeeesh.
