This is not a full blown guide, tutorial or introduction to logging in Java with the SLF4J abstraction, but a post that captures some of the nuances and components I personally had to get familiar with when I stopped seeing logging as an activity that happens only during development, to something that is actively build into software so as to have an insight into its state in production.
Personally...In the early days it was var_dump() and alert("It works"). Then I discovered the console…(thanks to Firebug and much later, Chrome DevTool) and I dropped alert in favor of console.log() And that was it... This was what "logging" was mainly about: A process of ascertaining the correctness of the software as we develop…
But as soon as I moved into building software systems on the JVM using Java, production logging became more upfront and also, the need for me, as a software developer, to proactively build logging into my application. It was not a complex switch, but looking back now, I realized that I unintentionally, for a while, approached writing production logging as if it were the ones that took place while development.
They are in no way the same...
First, there are more moving parts, second, the purpose differs: Including the ability for an application to write out log messages in production is to have insight into the internal state of the application and also, so as to provide a good source of forensics in case something goes wrong. It has even been estimated that any trivial system would have about 4% of its code base dedicated to logging. This shows how important production logging should be.
This post thus captures the new eyes with which I had to view production logging compared to the type I had long been familiar with; which is logging during development. It is written with logback in mind, which is an implementation of SLF4J, what has grown to be the standard abstraction when it comes to logging in Java
Almost all of what is mentioned would apply to any other SLF4J implementation. The difference that may exist would mostly likely be in the area of configurations...
...with that said, let’s start.