Cleanups in Affordance API and implementations of hypermedia type (de)serializers. Added a lot more domain methods and types to Link, ResourceSupport etc. to be able to move a lot of representation building logic into those.
AffordanceModelFactory is not a Spring Plugin anymore as that functionality is not needed currently as we statically look up all factories via the SpringFactoriesLoader mechanism.
Redesigned LinkRelation to become a first class abstraction in the codebase. IanaLinkRelations is now a collection of constants. Link now keeps a LinkRelation instance around instead of a plain String.
Tweaked LinkDiscoverer API to return Optional and Links instead of nullable Link and List<Link>.
Tweaked API of CurieProvider to make use of the newly introduced HalLinkRelation based on the general LinkRelation.
Additional fixes for the Kotlin extension functions. Make Kotlin build setup compile with JDK 8. Removed Objects helper class in favor of Spring's already existing Assert and it's usage in ResourceAssemblerSupport.
Fixed StackOverflowError in ControllerEntityLinks by delegating to the proper methods now. Clarified contract in EntityLinks interface. Added further unit tests to make sure the implementation behaves like the interface specifies.
Fixes#43.
EntityLinks allow accessing LinkBuilders or even Link instance based on components exposing REST resources for a particular domain type. The core implementation is ControllerEntityLinks that assumes a particular URI structure so that it can derive the URIs to be asked for per domain type. The domain type managed will be inspected from the @ExposesResourceFor annotation on a controller class. We provide a factory bean to allow configuring instances of ControllerEntityLinks based on a mapping annotation and LinkBuilderFactory.
Added infrastructure to activate automatic discovery of EntityLinks implementations through @EnableEntityLinks. This will automatically register ControllerEntityLinks instances for Spring MVC controllers annotated with @ExposesResourceFor as well as JAX-RS resources if JAX-RS is on the classpath. The mechanism essentially registers a DelegatingEntityLinks instance leveraging the Spring Plugin PluginRegistry mechanism to delegate to the actual EntityLinks instance actually registered for the entity type. It will become the primary EntityLinks bean in the ApplicationContext so that they can be autowired into client components safely.
