Java: Simple Logging Objects

2019/07

My favorite way to do traditional logging in Java is to utilize the simple class name which is often suitable for most reasonably complex cases, i.e. class#getName would additionally return the entire package path (e.g. com.example.foo.Bar) where as class#getSimpleName returns only the name of the class (e.g. Bar):

private final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(getClass().getSimpleName());

However if stuff becomes complex or you use different configuration depending on package identifiers you won't be able to do this but I think it is a good practice to start simple.

To log an object I like to overwrite the toString method with the org.apache.commons.lang3.builder.ReflectionToStringBuilder:

@Override
public String toString() {
    return ReflectionToStringBuilder.toString(this);
}

It provides a nice initial setup in reasonable cases to evolve from but if you have a security manager or non-thread-safe classes it will fail and you will see performance issues.