I would like to be able to use both commons-logging and the JDK as desired. I put a log4.properties file at the my src root which moves it to the classpath. Seems log4j will look for this file as a default if the system property log4j.configuration isn’t set. This worked fine to get commons-logging working. However, any changes to the properties file seems to have no effect. My first place in using this is with unit testing and then later will be used in a tomcat app.