Unfortunately, the worst thing about commons-logging, and what has made it unpopular with new tools, is also the runtime discovery algorithm. If we could turn back the clock and start Spring now as a new project it would use a different logging dependency. Probably the first choice would be the Simple Logging Facade for Java (SLF4J), which is also used by a lot of other tools that people use with Spring inside their applications.

To switch off commons-logging is easy: just make sure it isn't on the classpath at runtime. In Maven terms you exclude the dependency, and because of the way that the Spring dependencies are declared, you only have to do that once.

<dependencies>
   <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
      <version>3.1.2.RELEASE</version>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
      <exclusions>
         <exclusion>
            <groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
            <artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
         </exclusion>
      </exclusions>
   </dependency>
</dependencies>

Now this application is probably broken because there is no implementation of the JCL API on the classpath, so to fix it a new one has to be provided. In the next section we show you how to provide an alternative implementation of JCL using SLF4J as an example.

Using SLF4J

SLF4J is a cleaner dependency and more efficient at runtime than commons-logging because it uses compile-time bindings instead of runtime discovery of the other logging frameworks it integrates. This also means that you have to be more explicit about what you want to happen at runtime, and declare it or configure it accordingly. SLF4J provides bindings to many common logging frameworks, so you can usually choose one that you already use, and bind to that for configuration and management.

SLF4J provides bindings to many common logging frameworks,including JCL, and it also does the reverse: bridges between other logging frameworks and itself. So to use SLF4J with Spring you need to replace the commons-logging dependency with the SLF4J-JCL bridge. Once you have done that then logging calls from within Spring will be translated into logging calls to the SLF4J API, so if other libraries in your application use that API, then you have a single place to configure and manage logging.

A common choice might be to bridge Spring to SLF4J, and then provide explicit binding from SLF4J to Log4J. You need to supply 4 dependencies (and exclude the existing commons-logging): the bridge, theSLF4J API, the binding to Log4J, and the Log4J implementation itself. In Maven you would do that like this

<dependencies>
   <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
      <version>3.1.2.RELEASE</version>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
      <exclusions>
         <exclusion>
           <groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
           <artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
         </exclusion>
      </exclusions>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
      <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
      <artifactId>jcl-over-slf4j</artifactId>
      <version>1.7.0</version>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
      <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
      <artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
      <version>1.7.0</version>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
      <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
      <artifactId>slf4j-log4j12</artifactId>
      <version>1.7.0</version>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
      <groupId>log4j</groupId>
      <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
      <version>1.2.14</version>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
   </dependency>
</dependencies>

That might seem like a lot of dependencies just to get some logging. Well it is, but it is optional, and it should behave better than the vanilla commons-logging with respect to class loader issues, notably if you are in a strict container like an OSGi platform. Allegedly there is also a performance benefit because the bindings are at compile-time not runtime.

A more common choice amongst SLF4J users, which uses fewer step sand generates fewer dependencies, is to bind directly to Logback. This removes the extra binding step because Logback implements SLF4J directly, so you only need to depend on two libaries not four (jcl-over-slf4j and logback). If you do that you might also need to exclude the slf4j-api dependency from other external dependencies (not Spring), because you only want one version of that API on the classpath.

Using Log4J

Many people use <ahref="http://logging.apache.org/log4j">Log4j as a logging framework for configuration and management purposes. It's efficient and well established, and in fact it's what we use at runtime when we build and test Spring. Spring also provides some utilities for configuring and initializing Log4j, so it have an optional compile time dependency on Log4j in some modules.

To make Log4j work with the default JCL dependency (commons-logging) all you need to do is put Log4j on the classpath, and provide it with a configuration file(log4j.properties or log4j.xml in the root of the classpath). So for Maven users this is your dependency declaration:

<dependencies>
   <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
      <version>3.1.2.RELEASE</version>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
      <groupId>log4j</groupId>
      <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
      <version>1.2.14</version>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
   </dependency>
</dependencies>

And here's a sample log4j.properties for logging to the console:

log4j.rootCategory=INFO, stdout

log4j.appender.stdout=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.stdout.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.stdout.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ABSOLUTE} %5p %t %c{2}:%L - %m%n

log4j.category.org.springframework.beans.factory=DEBUG

Runtime Containers with Native JCL

Many people run their Spring applications in a container that itself provides an implementation of JCL. IBM Websphere Application Server (WAS) is the archetype. This often causes problems, and unfortunately there is no silver bullet solution; simply excluding commons-logging from your application is not enough inmost situations.

To be clear about this: the problems reported are usually not with JCL per se, or even with commons-logging: rather they are to do with binding commons-logging to another framework (often Log4J). This can fail because commons-logging changed the way they do the runtime discovery in between the older versions (1.0) found in some containers and the modern versions that most people use now (1.1). Spring does not use any unusual parts of the JCL API, so nothing breaks there, but as soon as Spring or your application tries to do any logging you can find that the bindings to Log4J are not working.

In such cases with WAS the easiest thing to do is to invert the classloader hierarchy (IBM calls it "parent last") so that the application controls the JCL dependency, not the container. That option isn't always open, but there are plenty of other suggestions in the public domain for alternative approaches, and your mileage may vary depending on the exact version and feature set of the container.

(Note: the Spring and slf4j versions have been updated from the original article to keep them copy-pasteable.)