I'm surprised this isn't a standard base pattern in languages, to be honest. Apache's commons-logging library was a standard part of enterprise java placements for many years, and only started to go away when Log4J came along.
Log4j is one of the possible backends for commons logging (and was basically the reason for it - choosing between log4j and the built-in java logging). I think you mean SLF4J?
I may be remembering it wrong, but I think log4j only became a commons logging backend several years after it became mainstream; before that I remember the two being entirely different and no interchangeable. It's a long time ago!
