Ability to have alternatives to toString()

[sduskis]

objects, such as Dates, often have requirements to be rendered differently than toString(). We should have some way to give a developer alternative rendering methods.

[jkovacs]

Have you considered adding java.util.Date to the list of primitives in ObjectUtil#isPrimitive? Both Jackson and JAXB have native support for handling Date instances and there is currently no other way to serialize date values that I'm aware of (by default dates result in the empty json object {} representation at the moment.)