I'm using Logback, but I build my code only against the SLF4J api. One thing that I found strange was that LoggerFactory is not actually part of the SLF4J api. This poses a challenge to me, because I will need to depend on some arbitrary implementation of an SLF4J api (probably the nop one) in order to build my code. Then at deployment time, I need to remove that slf4j-noop dependency and swap in a different one. The reason this is tricky for me is that the deployment process I use currently is (compile-time dependencies + extra runtime dependencies). The style in slf4j creates a ((compile-time dependencies - slf4j-nop) + runtime dependencies). This process is part of a larger overarching system that my organization happens to use, so bucking the trend isn't too fun - though possible. Also, it seems like all these implementations of LoggerFactory are pretty much identical. I think that these could be consolidated into a single LoggerFactory in the slf4-api package. This package could make use of the ServiceProvider mechanism thats present in Java 4 & 5 + standard in Java 6 to load the underlying Logger implementations. What do you think? I could probably contribute a patch that would demonstrate how this might work. -- - Eric