Call me old fashioned but I'm in the camp that says that the logging system 
should be brain-dead-simple and should never cause errors and should always 
work.  It exists to debug and diagnose other problems.  I shouldn't have to 
debug and diagnose it.

Now, what's happening here is we need TWO different views of logging: One is 
"software diagnostic" logging, so I can trace when certain pieces of code 
trigger and send myself messages.  The other level is "application monitoring" 
logging, where the application itself generates messages that are relevant to 
application users.

Let's take an MTA as an example.  A "software diagnostic" level might be 
something like, "fatal error: attempting to free() a null pointer".  That tells 
me, I've made a software mistake, in the logic.  A "application monitoring" 
message would be, "mail delivered successfully to..." or perhaps, "unable to 
bind to port 25; check to see if some other process is binding to that port."  
Do you see the difference?

What has happened unfortunately is that the Java community has not understood 
the difference.  We have these sophisticated logging frameworks that do a lot 
of things, but as we can see in this thread, they aren't bulletproof and they 
can and do cause their own problems.  This makes them bad for the software 
level logging I'm talking about.  Software level logging should focus on 
working 100% of the time.  That's why I always use java.util.logging for this, 
because it has no external jar dependencies, meaning that no matter what is 
going on with jars and classloaders, it will still always work.  That's how a 
software logging tool should be.

For the application-level logging, external dependencies are fine.  In my 
current Seam application, I actually have a logging MDB that various components 
use to send messages that users can then view through the web page.  That's 
cool but it's high level and fragile; it stops working if I make a config 
mistake, or have the wrong jar, or messages aren't working for whatever reason.


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