Team, The Cocoon project is starting to move away from Avalon. Their "building on stone" email thread today [1], deals with the need to build Cocoon on a solid framework they have control over, and not on the framework of another team that is apparently suffering from high turnover [2]). Cocoon is higher-level than FOP [3], so I think what's true for them is doubly true for us.
Accordingly, I think it's time now for us to do the same for FOP. I'd like us to drop the Avalon library for 1.0, and switch to Jakarta Commons-Logging [4] as a replacement for Avalon's logging component. For 1.0, I propose having FOP join Batik, Xalan, Xerces, AntennaHouse, RenderX, Struts, Axis, and (upcoming) Cocoon in no longer shipping with Avalon, nor requiring its users to import that library into their applications in order to use FOP. Here's my +1. Commons-logging offers the same type of logger options [5] that Avalon logging does: The user has a choice of no logger, stderr logger, Log4J, and JDK 1.4 logging. They can also create additional logging types. Commons-logging is currently being used by major open-source applications such as Tomcat, Tapestry, Apache Axis and Jakarta Struts, and *many* others [6], so we'll be moving into very good company. Another huge advantage I see for FOP in particular is exceptional integration with Struts applications. For Struts developers, the same commons-logging instance that they presently use for their application coding can be passed into FOP during PDF generation. No more needing to create a separate Avalon logging instance in their code, or (possibly) needing to have two different output logging files, one for each logging instance. This will look very nice architecturally for both FOP and Struts. I'll be more than happy to take care of the conversion for us--I'll make the change via a patch for us to review before committing. Thoughts? Votes? Thanks, Glen [1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=108004833700001&r=1&w=2 [2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=108005125410855&w=2 [3] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=fop-dev&m=105181262130439&w=2 [at the bottom] [4] http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/logging/ [5] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=struts-user&m=102090805604782&w=2 [6] http://lsd.student.utwente.nl/gump/jakarta-commons/commons-logging.html
