Critical Description
A converter has to deal with null values in both directions (from and to string) in a way that :
- Converting a null to string and back should return again null
- The String returned converting a null value should with no doubt be reconverted to a null value
- The string returned converting a null value should not be null itself.
The only exceptions are converters on a primitive type, which should return the proper "null" value (like 0 for numerics, false for boolean etc..) cause there is no other way to support a null value there, and "no value = 0" is a well established java default.
The most problematic one is the string converter, which obviously have some problems converting a null to a not null and back being both its input and output a string.
As opposed as it is now, converters will not be used for human display (except in urls, which are "humanly intelligible" but not human oriented), so magic values like "_NULL" or "null" are perfectly acceptable.