Thanks for you kind advise. Actually, for the 2rd comment, in my application, the log level is controlled by a property file. Sometimes I set it to warn in order to save time. In addition, I should be more careful with the other problems you mentioned.

Yes, AbstractExternalizable is from LingPipe. But I added a logger into it. LingPipe is very great, especially the documentation and tutorials. I can not imagine how you get all these work done almost all by yourself.

1. The recommended logger pattern’s now with an object member variable rather than a static.

2. Log4J prints out the log level by default, so you don’t need to append “debug”.

3. In general, you want to use Integer.toString(i) instead of concatenating to the empty string. Because System.out is a PrintStream, you can just use the method PrintStream.println(int), which will do the same thing.

And by the way, is that LingPipe’s class AbstractExternalizable? Or are there more classes named that in the wild?