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Creating a custom binder for Spring RCP

Introduction

For those not familiar with RCP, a quick heads-up. Spring RCP is a Swing application framework, based on the Spring Framework. It utilizes many of Spring's available utilities, the Spring IOC container being the most important one.

Bindings and binders

Spring RCP gives you the possibility to create controls that are bound to certain properties of a given object. These bound controls are called bindings. A binder is a class that creates bindings. A binding factory, if you will.
Standard Spring RCP has some basic binders, but often you will encounter user requirements that require you to build a custom binder. For example, a binder to show a list of objects in a JTable, a binder to show a String in a formatted text field or even a binding to show and select an image. These are not standard in RCP, and you'll need to make those yourself.