Writing external http interfaces with Spring

Yay. Using Springs @RequestBody and @ResponseBody is a delight. Everything magically appears and sorta works. One thing baffled me though, the StringHttpMessageConverter which is used behind the scenes assumes all input is ISO-8859-1. How lame, get with the program, it’s 2011. Changing this is not as easy as you would assume it would be with Spring. As the charset is a constructor parameter, a setter is not a possibility. So, the result was a Utf8StringHttpMessageConverter reimplementation of the interfaces