Essentially I'm looking for something with the same behavior, configuration, logging levels as log4j, but with some of the missing functionality (e.g. formatted logging — see [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/920458/) and [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/946730/) for related SO threads.)

Current nominees are [slf4j](http://www.slf4j.org/) and [log5j](http://code.google.com/p/log5j/).