SLF4J is quality software, but it's quite ironic that it needs to exist at all, considering how much of both the Java mentality and the commercially significant

SLF4J is quality software, but it's quite ironic that it needs to exist at all, considering how much of both the Java mentality and the commercially significant Java EE platform is about coding against a well-defined interface that defines basic contract and semantics and allows the developer/customer/etc to supply their favorite and most-appropriate implementation of choice. In the case of SLF4J, it was the community (or rather, Ceki Gülcü, the author of now-several logging frameworks, in response to his dissatisfaction with the community-led Apache Commons Logging) who stepped in to provide the 'generic' API, while Sun went and developed an actual 'hardcoded' implementation deliberately different from the popular third-party logging frameworks of the time instead and shipped it with Java 1.4.