The project started simply as a library with some (little) common functionality used throughout most projects. Later on it became clear that there isn’t really a way to use an apache-commons library without causing the dependency on commons-logging, etc. Using Kit/J in application servers or legacy projects required often concurrently managing different versions of Apache libraries. So, in time, one of the main goals of Kit/J became to be independent of Apache libraries. Then we will have one library with all functionality included, requiring no external dependencies.