Issue: SPR-9480

 Issue: SPR-9487

Prior to this change, PropertySourcesPropertyResolver (and therefore
all AbstractEnvironment) implementations failed to resolve nested
placeholders as in the following example:

    p1=v1
    p2=v2
    p3=${v1}:{$v2}

Calls to PropertySource#getProperty for keys 'p1' and 'v1' would
successfully return their respective values, but for 'p3' the return
value would be the unresolved placeholders. This behavior is
inconsistent with that of PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer.

PropertySourcesPropertyResolver #getProperty variants now resolve any
nested placeholders recursively, throwing IllegalArgumentException for
any unresolvable placeholders (as is the default behavior for
PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer). See SPR-9569 for an enhancement that
will intoduce an 'ignoreUnresolvablePlaceholders' switch to make this
behavior configurable.

This commit also improves error output in
PropertyPlaceholderHelper#parseStringValue by including the original
string in which an unresolvable placeholder was found.

Issue: SPR-9473, SPR-9569

Before this change HandlerMethod used ClassUtils.getUserClass(Class<?>)
to get the real user class, and not one generated by CGlib. However it
failed to that under all circumstances. This change fixes that.

Issue: SPR-9490

Before this change the StringHttpMessageConverter used a fixed charset
"ISO-8859-1" if the requested content type did not specify one. This
change adds a defaultCharset field and a constructor to configure it in
StringHttpMessageConverter.

Issue: SPR-9487

Issue: SPR-9287

moved getInputStream() not-null requirement to InputStreamSource itself; removed misleading "throws IllegalStateException" declaration

Issue: SPR-9561

Issue: SPR-9521

Issue: SPR-9528

Issue: SPR-9536

Before this change the HandlerExecitionChain logged errors each time a
an AsyncHandlerInterceptor returned a null async Callable, a condition
which is acceptable.

SPR-9524

* SPR-9530:
  Improve SimpleStreamingClientHttpRequest performance

Ensure that NonClosingOutputStream calls with a byte array call the
corresponding methods of the underlying OutputStream rather than
relying on the default NonClosingOutputStream implementation, which
writes one bte at a time. This significantly improves performance.

Issues: SPR-9530

Issue: SPR-9443, SPR-6847, SPR-9446, SPR-9444, SPR-9439, SPR-9302,
       SPR-9507, SPR-9238, SPR-9397, SPR-9406, SPR-9502

@Async executor qualification has been backported to 3.1.2. This commit
updates all @since tags appropriately, as well as carrying over the
changes backported to the spring-task-3.1 schema.

Issue: SPR-6847, SPR-9443

Issue: SPR-9289

Return an empty map when there are no path variables, rather than
raising an exception. This is consistent with similar resolvers for
extracting headers and request parameters.

Issue: SPR-9289

Following the introduction of ContentNegotiationManager that allows,
among other things, to configure the file extensions to use for content
negotiation, this change adds "smart" suffix pattern match that matches
against the configured file extensions only rather than against any
extension.

Given the request mapping "/jobs/{jobName}" and one configured file
extension ("json"), a request for "/jobs/my.job" will select the
pattern "/jobs/{jobName}" while a request for "/jobs/my.job.json" will
select the pattern "/jobs/{jobName}.json". Previously, both requests
would have resulted in the pattern "/jobs/{jobName}.*".

Issue: SPR-7632, SPR-8474

Issue: SPR-8410, SPR-8417, SPR-8418,SPR-8416, SPR-8419,SPR-7722

Issue: SPR-7985

The exact text above the "Staying in touch" section caused "Staying in
touch" to lose it's formatting as a second-level heading.  Adding
" for details" to the sentence above works around the problem.

Issue: SPR-9536

XStreamMarshaller should convert XStream StreamException to Spring
exception in case of unmarshalling an empty stream.

Issue: SPR-9536

The HTTP PATCH method is now supported whereever HTTP methods are used.
Annotated controllers can be mapped to RequestMethod.PATCH.

On the client side the RestTemplate execute(..) and exchange(..)
methods can be used with HttpMethod.PATCH. In terms of HTTP client
libraries, Apache HttpComponents HttpClient version 4.2 or later is
required (see HTTPCLIENT-1191). The JDK HttpURLConnection does not
support the HTTP PATCH method.

Issue: SPR-7985

Introduced ContentNeogtiationStrategy for resolving the requested
media types from an incoming request. The available implementations
are based on path extension, request parameter, 'Accept' header,
and a fixed default content type. The logic for these implementations
is based on equivalent options, previously available only in the
ContentNegotiatingViewResolver.

Also in this commit is ContentNegotiationManager, the central class to
use when configuring content negotiation options. It accepts one or
more ContentNeogtiationStrategy instances and delegates to them.

The ContentNeogiationManager can now be used to configure the
following classes:

- RequestMappingHandlerMappingm
- RequestMappingHandlerAdapter
- ExceptionHandlerExceptionResolver
- ContentNegotiatingViewResolver

Issue: SPR-8410, SPR-8417, SPR-8418,SPR-8416, SPR-8419,SPR-7722

PropertySourcesPropertyResolver#containsProperty now
calls #containsProperty on each underlying PropertySource instead of
calling #getProperty and checking for null.

Issue: SPR-9529

The reference manual currently documents the wrong file name for the
default data SQL script used by EmbeddedDatabaseBuilder. In addition,
the testing chapter of the reference manual does not link to the testing
section of the JDBC chapter.

 - Updated the "Testing data access logic with an embedded database"
   section of the reference manual appropriately.
 - Added a new paragraph to the "JDBC Testing Support" section of the
   testing chapter which cross references the "Testing data access logic
   with an embedded database" section.

Issue: SPR-9467

Issue: SPR-9493

Commit aa415d7c introduced
JacksonObjectMapperFactoryBean and associated tests, but with Windows
(CRLF) line endings instead of the conventional Unix (LF) line endings.

This commit converts these files to LF endings using the handy
`dos2unix` utility.

Issue: SPR-9125

* SPR-9493:
  Infer return type of parametrized factory methods

Currently, if a factory method is parameterized and the corresponding
variable types are declared on the method itself instead of on the
enclosing class or interface, Spring always predicts the return type to
be Object, even if the return type can be explicitly inferred from the
method signature and supplied arguments (which are available in the bean
definition).

This commit introduces a new resolveParameterizedReturnType() method in
GenericTypeResolver that attempts to infer the concrete type for the
generic return type of a given parameterized method, falling back to the
standard return type if necessary. Furthermore,
AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory now delegates to
resolveParameterizedReturnType() when predicting the return type for
factory methods.

resolveParameterizedReturnType() is capable of inferring the concrete
type for return type T for method signatures similar to the following.
Such methods may potentially be static. Also, the formal argument list
for such methods is not limited to a single argument.

 - public <T> T foo(Class<T> clazz)
 - public <T> T foo(Object obj, Class<T> clazz)
 - public <V, T> T foo(V obj, Class<T> clazz)
 - public <T> T foo(T obj)

Issue: SPR-9493

The readme is heavy on links and hard to read in source form when using
typical inline Markdown links. The following changes have been made to
increase readability.

 - Wrap lines at 80 characters
 - Use 'implicit link name' shortcut syntax as described at [1]
 - Add link to 'spring-mvc' Stack Overflow tag as well
 - Add link to new 'lifecycle of an issue' wiki doc

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

Some Spring Framework users and teams cannot use transitive dependency
management tools like Maven, Gradle and Ivy. For them, a `distZip` task
has been added to allow for creating a Spring Framework distribution
from source that includes all optional and required runtime
dependencies for all modules of the framework.

This 'dist-with-deps' zip is not published to the SpringSource
repository nor to the SpringSource community download page. It is
strictly an optional task introduced as a convenience to the users
mentioned above.

Detailed instructions for building this zip locally have been added to
the wiki and the README has been updated with a link to that new doc.

Issue: SPR-6575

Fixed outdated Javadoc regarding support for 'annotated classes' in
the TestContext Framework.

Issue: SPR-5022

* SPR-9125:
  BeanFactory for configuring a Jackson ObjectMapper

The BeanFactory makes it easier to configure a customized Jackson
ObjectMapper (for example enable/disable certain features).
This bean factory is usually used with
MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter or MappingJacksonJsonView.
See JavaDoc for examples.

Issue: SPR-9125