The Next Big Thing
I know, I’m bashing commons-logging for all The Worlds Problems at the moment.
A couple of commons-logging related links: http://www.qos.ch/logging/classloader.jsp and http://www.qos.ch/logging/thinkAgain.jsp.
Especially the last links title spurs a somewhat controversial observation: Thing Again before adopting the XYZ framework.
Remember the movie Amadeus? Remember the Emperors unforgettable remark after listenening to one of Mozarts concerts: “Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. But there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.”?
That’s how I feel about a lot of the frameworks out there. Some of them are truly ingenious, some of them indeed are quality work, but there are simply too many of them!
Most software developers know that n-tier architectures are the way to go, but let’s keep n small! Lots of frameworks are about increasing n, adding one more layer between the stuff the user interacts with and the stuff in the database. Lots of frameworks deal with abstractions of some sort. My favorite these days is commons-logging; why do we need a layer between our application and the logging framework of our choice (Java logging, log4j, …)? It’s not just about adding one more jar-file to our applications! It’s also about having to understand yet another API, yet another set of configuration files – basically yet another complicating factor in an (often) already complicated setup.
Btw. Mozart, in my opinion, used just the right number of notes 
