On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:55 AM, Paul Sandoz <Paul.Sandoz_at_sun.com> wrote:
...
> Here is an interesting blog related to this topic:
>
> http://soundadvice.id.au/blog/2009/05/05/#textplain
Ah yes, quite interesting. This would suggest that it might be good to
support such simple conversions, for non-structured
(primitive/wrapper) data types. It sort of makes sense, if you are
familiar with usual lo-fi approaches to using unix tools and
pipelining (like what things like Nagios use): one can think of web
services as similar stdin/stdout devices when using text/plain.
Implementation could be trivial -- like "white list" anything for
which toString() should be called (classes and/or packages), call
toString() on those.
-+ Tatu +-