Migrate logger from commons-logging to slf4j (remove commons-logging dependency) [SPR-6607]

[spring-projects-issues]

Alexandre Navarro opened SPR-6607 and commented

Migrate logger from commons-logging to slf4j (remove commons-logging dependency) because commons-logging has classloading problems

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Affects: 3.0 GA

Issue Links:

• Revisit Commons Logging vs java.util.logging vs SLF4J vs Log4j 2 [SPR-14512] #19081 Revisit Commons Logging vs java.util.logging vs SLF4J vs Log4j 2

6 votes, 5 watchers

[spring-projects-issues]

Jon Fisher commented

Please consider this move. It's been rejected in the past for 'backwards compatibility' concerns, however, those who need backwards compatibility can use the slf4j-commons-logging brdige.

The slf4j-api is far superior to commons-logging. It provides parameterized logging, a wider choice of underlying frameworks, no classloading issues, and is a blessing for those who are unfortunate enough to run websphere.

Hibernate and EHCache have moved to SLF4j, Spring Framework should follow suit.

[spring-projects-issues]

Andrew Muraco commented

SLF4J provides a tool to automate most of the actual changeover, It'd just be testing & documentation of the change.

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller commented

At this point, we're not going to migrate our logging API use to SLF4J anymore. SLF4J is commonly used with Spring, through the Commons Logging bridge... But SLF4J has further competition now, with Hibernate having migrated to JBoss Logging, Log4J 2 about to be released, etc.

And just to correct the assumption above, our backwards compatibility concern is not with existing Commons Logging setup, it's with existing code calling into the logger references that Spring base classes are exposing. Switching the logger interface would break all existing subclasses outside of our control, in particular the pre-compiled ones from third-party libraries. That's a pill we'd only swallow for a major gain... and for Spring's own purposes, Commons Logging is still alright. Applications can decide to use SLF4J or Log4J 2 or whatever in their own code anyway.

Juergen

[spring-projects-issues]

Hendy Irawan commented

Original ticket: #10000