slf4j logging is pretty easy and promises to be a lot more performant than log4j. Here's a discussion: http://xhab.blogspot.com/2007/03/new-logging-experience.html. It's a very thorough treatment (overview and discussion).

I'm presently investigating. The documentation seems very clean, however, it is severely tainted by log4j baggage: the author assumes that you're coming to slf4j from log4j or another system and not that you're ready to start fresh. In fact, at this point, I don't even know if you can isolate your usage to just slf4j, but my preliminary attempts to write sample code for it appear to support that you can. I can't seem to get debug messages to come out, only info for now. See sample code and console output below.

Other crucial links to slf4j:

• The main site: http://www.slf4j.org/.

Source code sample

Here is the sample code for the output we'll be studying.

	package com.etretatlogiciels.samples.slf4j;

	import org.slf4j.Logger;
	import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;


	public class SLF4J
	{
	  Integer             cur, old;
	  final static Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger( SLF4J.class );

	  public void setTemperature( Integer temperature )
	  {
	    old = cur;
	    cur = temperature;
	    logger.debug( "Temperature set to {}. Old temperature was {}.", cur, old );
	    if( temperature.intValue() > 50 )
	      logger.info( "Temperature has risen above 50 degrees." );
	  }

	  public static void main( String[] args )
	  {
	    SLF4J  slf4j = new SLF4J();
	    slf4j.setTemperature( 60 );
	  }
	}

Console output

	29 [main] INFO com.etretatlogiciels.samples.slf4j.SLF4J - Temperature has risen above 50 degrees.