Contribution to SpringFramework

Finally, SpringFramework 3.2.2 is out and includes few very interesting addons:

• ObjectToStringHttpMessageConverter (SPR-9738) provides a bridge to ConversionService implementations allowing your WebMethods to return numbers, arrays – anything that ConversionService can turn into String. Just register it in your Web context
  

  <mvc:annotation-driven>
      <mvc:message-converters>
          <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.ObjectToStringHttpMessageConverter">
              <constructor-arg>
                  <bean class="org.springframework.context.support.ConversionServiceFactoryBean" />
              </constructor-arg>
              <property name="writeAcceptCharset" value="false" />
          </bean>
      </mvc:message-converters>
  </mvc:annotation-driven>

  and now this is possible:
  

  @ResponseBody
  public int submitJob() { ... }

• Jackson2ObjectMapperFactoryBean (SPR-9739) allows you to configure Jackson e.g. in your Web context:
  

  <mvc:annotation-driven>
      <mvc:message-converters>
          <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter">
              <property name="objectMapper">
                  <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.Jackson2ObjectMapperFactoryBean"
                      p:autoDetectFields="false"
                      p:failOnEmptyBeans="false"
                      p:indentOutput="true">
                      <property name="featuresToDisable">
                          <array>
                              <util:constant static-field="com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS" />
                          </array>
                      </property>
                      <property name="serializers">
                          <array>
                              <bean class="org.myproject.NumberSerializer" />
                          </array>
                      </property>
                  </bean>
              </property>
          </bean>
      </mvc:message-converters>
  </mvc:annotation-driven>

  In majority of cases the configuration will be much simpler – this one shows it with full power.
• ResourceBundleMessageSource (more exactly: all descendants of AbstractMessageSource) now has commonMessages property which can hold locale-independent values. For example while you want to have mail subject and body locale-dependant, some properties (mail from and mail to) are common across all bundles (no need to duplicate them) (check SPR-10291):
  

  <bean id="mailProperties" class="org.springframework.context.support.ResourceBundleMessageSource">
      <property name="basename" value="org.mycompany.email" />
      <property name="commonMessages">
          <props>
              <prop key="email.from">empty@mydomain.org</prop>
              <prop key="email.to">%s@mydomain.org</prop>
          </props>
      </property>
  </bean>

• And last but not least important is the introduction of logic that infers type of returned bean (created by some factory) based on the passed arguments (see SPR-9493). That makes e.g. testing much easier to configure (refer SPR-9130) as one need to declare just one factory for all types instead of factory-per-type.

I hope that my small contribution will help many. And separate thanks for code reviewers and commiters of SpringSource.

Sibling selectors in IE

I've spend literally hours to understand why my cool freshly baked CSS with sibling selectors (like table th:first-child + th + th) works fine with FF but not in IE. And the problem was that if HTML page does not start with DOCTYPE "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" or similar, IE will fallback to compatibility mode with "old" HTML thus effectively disabling some CSS features (see stackoverlow post). After the problem is identified it took minutes to correct XSL to produce DOCTYPE that IE wants to see.