Processing JSON Data with Jackson

The article that I read this week is about processing JSON data with Jackson. I thought this would be a good article to read after using JSON data a lot this week for processing input and output in our final projects, and since Spring Boot uses Jackson as the way for processing JSON. I wanted to learn more about how this works, especially after getting some errors when trying to pass in certain data types this week (particularly Calendar objects). This post goes over how to read and write JSON data to and from Java objects using Jackson for data binding. It does this by creating an example POJO to use for input and output. It creates a basic employee with the fields of name, ID number, address and other typical fields, it also has an object within an object by using an address within Employee that contains a street, city, and zip code. The article creates an example of this in a JSON input file and creates the necessary Java classes and then implements the Jackson methods (such as ObjectMapper) for databinding and outputting Java input as a JSON file.

I think that it was interesting to see how to do this with the Jackson implementation as a seemingly more proper method of converting JSON to Java objects and the other way around. Especially after spending the past week creating and getting our project to pass similar data back and forth between JSON and Java. It does seem out of the ordinary to me that both of the example classes don’t use constructors, instead using just set methods to create the object, but that’s how this implementation is supposed to work with Jackson. I particularly liked the Tree Model implementation in the article and was not aware that this was a way of processing JSON data. This article has definitely made me think more about the different ways of processing JSON data with web applications and REST APIs and the best practices to use when doing this, especially with larger, serious implementations for applications. If time permits for our final project, I would like to try and do a similar implementation in this article for our JSON processing. By doing this, it would make adding new objects to the database a lot cleaner (especially without needing a constructor) in the implementation than it currently is.

Source: https://dzone.com/articles/processing-json-with-jackson