It's relatively trivial to modify the way dates are formatted when they are bound to form fields with Spring. Just implement the initBinder method in your controller. Here's an example.

protected void initBinder(HttpServletRequest request,
                          ServletRequestDataBinder binder)
  throws Exception
{
  super.initBinder(request, binder);
  binder.registerCustomEditor(Date.class,
    "estimatedCompletionDate",
    new CustomDateEditor(new SimpleDateFormat( "M/d/yy"), true)
  );
}