HiveMind: smart translator

Just added a new, nifty thing to HiveMind ... the smart translator. In HiveMind, a translator is an object that plugs into an XML conversion rule. It can interpret an XML attribute and convert it to a different type ... for example, to a boolean, or an int.

The new smart translator does the conversion based on the type of property the result will be assigned to. I got the idea from Spring, which does this kind of conversion already. What's the end result? Well, usage of the central hivemind.BuilderFactory is simplified, because now there's just a <set> element, the old type-specific elements (<set-boolean>, <set-int> and <set-long>) have been removed. Eventually, I would have had to write <set-double>, <set-char>, etc. That no longer necessary.

There's still specialized elements such as <set-service> and <set-configuration> ... those things can't be seamlessly accomplished using the JDK's PropertyEditor class, since they rely on a bunch of information only available inside the HiveMind Registry. Perhaps in the future, I'll be able to make the smart translator even smarter.

That covers the property injection side of things; I need to revisit the constructor injection part. There's still too many elements in place there, because with constructors, there's no property that's getting assigned, so no way to know what the type should be. In fact, I'll revisit the code and make it work backwards from the available constructors to find the correct match. In most cases, finding a match shouldn't be an issue, even if there's some guesswork with some of the constructor parameters.

Meanwhile, I have a bunch of other great ideas to implement, based on the recent discussions on The Server Side.