named converters deprecated? Can you do something similar with Formatters?

[gemini929]

Reading through the SWF documentation, it is clear that the starting with SWF 2.1, the preference is to use the Spring 3 type conversion and formatting system instead of the converters used previously.

While I understand that you can still use named converters (even though they are deprecated), I rather like having the ability to specify a specific converter for "shortdate" rather than "longdate". Looking at the documentation, it appears that in this situation I would only be able to specify a single formatter for the String -> Date and Date -> String conversion.

If I wanted to specify a "shortdate" formatter vs a "longdate" formatter, how would it be done (without annotations)?

[gemini929]

I would really like to know if named converters will be replaced with annotations in SWF 3. That is the only way I can think of that you can specify different formatters for the same conversions.

Without named converters and annotations, is there another way to format objects (such as dates) in two different ways?