Spring MVC complex model population from multiple sources

Question

Well, my question may sound a little bit fuzzy, but here it is, anyways. I\'m building a web application using Spring MVC 3.1.M1, JSP 2.1 (without Tiles, I use plain JSP tag

Answer 1

Finally, I decided to stick with @ModelAttribute approach, despite its limitations.

/**
 * Base class for all page controllers (i.e., not form submits)
 * @author malexejev
 * 23.03.2011
 */
public abstract class AbstractPageController {

    @Autowired
    private VisitorService visitorService;

    @Autowired
    private I18nSupport i18nSupport;

    @Value("${xxx.env}")
    private String environment;

    /**
     * Implicit model enrichment with reference data.
     * No heavy operations allowed here, since it is executed before any handler method of 
     * all extending controllers
     */
    @ModelAttribute("appContext")
    public Map populateReferenceData(HttpServletRequest request) {
        Map dataMap = new HashMap();

        // FIXME some data is app-wide and constant, no need to re-create such map entries
        // I should take care about it when more reference data is added
        dataMap.put("visitorName", visitorService.getVisitorName());
        dataMap.put("env", environment);
        dataMap.put("availableLanguages", i18nSupport.getAvailableLanguages());
        dataMap.put("currentPath", request.getPathInfo() != null ? request.getPathInfo() : request.getServletPath());

        return Collections.unmodifiableMap(dataMap);
    }

}

This way i can get data in views via ${appContext.visitorName}. It allows me to switch transparently to Spring bean implementation (see No 3 in my answer above, @Component("headerContext") ) in case of any future problems with @ModelAttributes.

Thanks all to discussion. I dont see any "silver bullet" solution found here, so I will not mark any answer as accepted, but will vote up all answers to this question.