Allow application-wide date format to be customized through a global property

Currently, the date format used throughout the web application is either hard-coded into JSPs or is hard-coded to a default value via a constant. When a user changes Locale, this can have unintended side-effects with date formatting. For example, on many pages, the format of MM/dd/yyyy is used if the locale is en_US, but the format of dd/MM/yyyy is used if the locale is en_GB. This can lead to a lot of confusion with end-users who do not necessarily know which format they are looking at. An implementer should have the option of displaying all dates in a specified format however they desire. Specifically, I want to configure our systems such that all dates are displayed in dd/MMM/yyyy format, and I want the entire (core) application to respect this configuration decision.

Date formatting should be centralized with shared widgets that respect data formatting when rendering & editing as we all documented recipes available for properly formatting dates in code, JSP, etc. to ensure that we are consistently (in all cases) first considering the user's preference and then considering a global preference.