Question

I am writing a small utility library and I need to do some logging. I don’t want to force the user to have to use a specific logging framework such as Log4J or commons-logging, so should I use SLF4J and include all of the bridges so that it just integrates with whatever they are using? Or should I just use java.util.logging? I should mention that this is a Maven project as well.

Answer 1

Personally, for such cases, I have only the following runtime dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
</dependency>

And these for testing:

<dependency>
    <groupId>ch.qos.logback</groupId>
    <artifactId>logback-core</artifactId>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>ch.qos.logback</groupId>
    <artifactId>logback-classic</artifactId>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

So when someone wants to use me, they have to include only the bridge for their logging implementation.

EDIT: I use dependency management that’s why version is missing 🙂