It's a sad story. The proliferation of logging libraries was the problem that Commons Logging aimed to solve by providing a facade over all of them. But because it screws up classloading (i forget the details, but it's serious), eventually a critical mass of people needed to move off it. java.util.logging tried to fix the problems and canonise a standard interface by putting in the JDK, but it got so many things wrong that it wasn't widely adopted. SLF4J finally came along as a very well-implemented facade that has gained wide adoption. It would say it is a de facto standard.

Only then JBoss decided that all their stuff (including Hibernate) needed a facade of its own, which manages to not quite properly interact with SLF4J!

It's almost enough to drive me to printlns.