The idea was to limit the Configuration interface to the most important data types and provide a kind of data type conversion service that can be wrapped arround a Configuration object and supports a richer interface with additional data types. This service can be quite generic and not configuration specific. Because the [convert] project deals with data type conversion it seems to be a good starting place.
What I have in mind is the following:
- An interface defining a conversion source, which could look as follows:
public interface ConversionSource {
Object getProperty(Object key, Object defaultValue);
}- A class that can be instantiated with such a conversion source as argument. This class would define a couple of getter methods for properties with different data types. Internally such a getter would fetch the properties from the conversion source object, perform the necessary conversion and return the result (or throw an exception).
Different implementations of the ConversionSource interface would allow usage of the conversion service whereever nasty data type conversions are needed, e.g. for Configuration objects, servlet request parameters or whatever.
What do you think of this approach? If I provided some patches for this feature, would somebody be willing to apply them?
BTW, what is the actual status of the [convert] project (I had trouble when building the latest CVS version; two unit tests fail)?
Regards Oliver
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