Cruel Christmas: commons-commons-logging.jar
Just when you thought it’s safe to indulge in a little Christmas spirit, that the world isn’t so bad after all, that dictators can indeed be caught and tortured on foreign soil (for some value of foreign), that terrorists can be beaten up in jail and the videotape material destroyed, along comes more smut from those wacky kids at Jakarta.
Alas, all that good news is ruined yet again by that perennial party pooper, Apache. This time in the shape of an all-singing, all-dancing, one framework to rule them all, logging nonsense. It is truly amazing how these people seem to have so much time to worry about logging. What is it about logging that’s so exciting that it makes legions of developers sport inappropriate moistness?
If you want to have some real fun though, I recommend reading the list archives for this proposal to turn logging into a top level framework. It’s more fun than chucking your babies out of 4th floor windows and sex with a recently deceased fish put together.
For one thing, it shows that there’s a universal disdain and hatred towards commons-logging. A surprisingly high number of people admit it’s rubbish, broken, retarded, and generally useless if you have anything non-trivial. The consensus is that the sooner it dies the better. That it was an ambitious attempt that failed. That it’s horribly complex, and will die through natural selection (quote: Given the tremendous complexity it brings to the game, it will end up “taking out” itself without our help). Such sweet sweet music.
Yet despite that, the calls are for the replacement to be more functional, and smaller (perhaps some lessons on software trade-offs are in order). They’ve also admitted that the definition of ‘interoperability with sister projects’ currently involves nothing more than frantic handwaving, but that it does not guarantee the same API will be used, nor is it a guarantee of protocol interoperability. Not that it’d be useful anyway, given that socket appenders are only fun for about 20 seconds, before you realise that your performance had plummeted to depths only JBoss developers frequent.
Of course, no proposal is complete without the odd smartass piping in saying how it’s already been done in their project, and that the new project should leverage the existing experience (or idiocy, as it’s know to the sane lurking amongst us). This time the call comes courtesy of some Avalon twat, pimping some newfangled bootstrapping system. It really just proves that bad software never dies; it just gets an increasingly fanatical crowd. Commercial products die by running out of money, opensource is a lot harder to kill, so incompetence is glorified and lingers on for millennia, a cancer eating away at our very souls.
Anyway, what I find most amazing about the whole process is how not one single person had the courage and foresight to stand up and say ‘good god, what an incredibly stupid idea!’. Every single post on the proposal thread approves, along with contributing some irrelevant opinions about how great it all is and how it’s sorely needed blahblah. The sheer lunacy is mindboggling. It’s truly a cause for despair, how a bunch of people can get together and convince themselves to commit such acts of pure evil, yet feel righteous and smug about it, and sleep easy at night thinking the world is a better place with them in it.
December 19th, 2003 at 10:20 am
FRIST PIST!
December 19th, 2003 at 11:26 am
Can’t wait for commons-commons-commons-logging….
December 19th, 2003 at 11:29 am
we should rant about javablogs.com (i know hani did that a few days ago), but its down again and the funny thing about it, i tried 3x times surfing javablogs.com the last 2 weeks, the result was: 2x times down.
Hell, we cant expect that its 99,5% up over the year, because we dont pay for it, but even for a community project, these uptimes are crazy…
December 19th, 2003 at 12:35 pm
When is that other project starting aiming at uniting all of the flavours of JBoss around … JBoss, Geronimo, JFox, … we could call it commons-jboss maybe ?
December 19th, 2003 at 2:50 pm
Hani, you’re missing the point. The point of a top-level logging project is to break free from the Java tyranny.
December 19th, 2003 at 3:08 pm
I’m probably showing my ignorance here, but what’s wrong with Log4J?
December 19th, 2003 at 3:53 pm
Gerald, if Java is so bad, quit posting in Java forums. We would ALL love to see you go.
I’m opening the door, don’t let it smack your ass on the way out…
December 19th, 2003 at 10:36 pm
Yeah, and no clown smacking on the way out …
December 20th, 2003 at 2:36 pm
Heheheh!
December 21st, 2003 at 10:14 am
Just use Log4J. Hani’s right. What a bunch of idiots.
December 21st, 2003 at 11:47 am
eh, heheheh….he said….”Log”
December 21st, 2003 at 5:54 pm
Just use System.out and move on to another project.
December 22nd, 2003 at 6:39 am
“The point of a top-level logging project is to break free from the Java tyranny.”
err…what? I hope to god that is a joke, right? How is a logging framework going to do that?
December 22nd, 2003 at 7:17 am
The point of commons-logging is simple. It’s so someone can create a reusable library that Log4J users can use, and those people poor enough to have to suffer through java.util.logging can also use, with logging enabled.
Personally I just don’t include logging in my reusable libraries that users can use. If they want it, they can open the source up and get it themselves. Cheeky blighters.
December 22nd, 2003 at 10:10 am
I understand the point of commons-logging. I’m still unsure how a logging framework will free us from “Java tyranny” :-)
December 22nd, 2003 at 5:18 pm
> I understand the point of commons-logging. I’m
> still unsure how a logging framework will free us
> from “Java tyranny” :-)
It’s pretty simple: it lets you choose your language. You’re not stuck with 10000 % pure Sun certified Java as the one and only “choice”.
December 22nd, 2003 at 10:32 pm
Isn’t it about time for Jason to post a 4 paragraph diatribe about the virtues of using web/xwork as a logging framework b/c of the incredible power of OGNL or the unadulterated beauty of “the value stack”? Jason?
December 23rd, 2003 at 6:54 pm
What are you talking about Hani?
No, really, I have no idea what this post is talking about. Apache-Logging? What’s that got to do with commons-logging? What’s commons-commons-logging?
December 29th, 2003 at 8:54 am
Whilst I am not a full-blown Jakarta mental masturbator, I do see a potential point in commons-logging in that it acts as a thin bridge between application code and the 3rd party infrastructure of your choice.
For instance, one might start working on a project which has bespoke logging and uses Java 1.3. You know that 1.4 has logging packages. An obvious and reasonably pain-free lookahead view to migration would be to convert to using commons-logging with the same bespoke logger implementation underneath, move to something like log4j afterwards, then when you’re able to use Java 1.4 go to that. The latter two stages are configuration only.
Just my 2p..
January 1st, 2004 at 8:44 pm
Hello!
What is all this ranting about?! I want to hear about real, proper, cool stuff. A good rant is only good if it’s in-season. Besides, Java is outdated and it’s time to move on to better things…