Introduction to the Common Logging Facility

As the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) began to deploy CGI programs and Applets written in Java, we found it extremely difficult to determine the source of operational problems with those programs. We soon began to realize we needed to develop a core reusable set of services that would allow us to gather operational statistics (or metrics), provide common error handling, and gather debugging information.

Since Java is the programming language of choice for Web development at UPRR, we needed a mechanism to provide remote data gathering. This capability appeared with the release of Java 1.1 from Sun Microsystems.

This document will describe the functional and technical aspects of the Common Logging Facility (CLF).