Converting JSON data to Java object

Question

I looked at Google's Gson as a potential JSON plugin. Can anyone offer some form of guidance as to how I can generate Java from this JSON string?

Google Gson supports generics and nested beans. The [] in JSON represents an array and should map to a Java collection such as List or just a plain Java array. The {} in JSON represents an object and should map to a Java Map or just some JavaBean class.

You have a JSON object with several properties of which the groups property represents an array of nested objects of the very same type. This can be parsed with Gson the following way:

package com.stackoverflow.q1688099;

import java.util.List;
import com.google.gson.Gson;

public class Test {

    public static void main(String... args) throws Exception {
        String json = 
            "{"
                + "'title': 'Computing and Information systems',"
                + "'id' : 1,"
                + "'children' : 'true',"
                + "'groups' : [{"
                    + "'title' : 'Level one CIS',"
                    + "'id' : 2,"
                    + "'children' : 'true',"
                    + "'groups' : [{"
                        + "'title' : 'Intro To Computing and Internet',"
                        + "'id' : 3,"
                        + "'children': 'false',"
                        + "'groups':[]"
                    + "}]" 
                + "}]"
            + "}";

        // Now do the magic.
        Data data = new Gson().fromJson(json, Data.class);

        // Show it.
        System.out.println(data);
    }

}

class Data {
    private String title;
    private Long id;
    private Boolean children;
    private List<Data> groups;

    public String getTitle() { return title; }
    public Long getId() { return id; }
    public Boolean getChildren() { return children; }
    public List<Data> getGroups() { return groups; }

    public void setTitle(String title) { this.title = title; }
    public void setId(Long id) { this.id = id; }
    public void setChildren(Boolean children) { this.children = children; }
    public void setGroups(List<Data> groups) { this.groups = groups; }
    
    public String toString() {
        return String.format("title:%s,id:%d,children:%s,groups:%s", title, id, children, groups);
    }
}

Fairly simple, isn't it? Just have a suitable JavaBean and call Gson#fromJson().

See also:

• Json.org - Introduction to JSON
• Gson User Guide - Introduction to Gson

Bewaaaaare of Gson! It's very cool, very great, but the second you want to do anything other than simple objects, you could easily need to start building your own serializers (which isn't that hard).

Also, if you have an array of Objects, and you deserialize some json into that array of Objects, the true types are LOST! The full objects won't even be copied! Use XStream.. Which, if using the jsondriver and setting the proper settings, will encode ugly types into the actual json, so that you don't loose anything. A small price to pay (ugly json) for true serialization.

Note that Jackson fixes these issues, and is faster than GSON.

Oddly, the only decent JSON processor mentioned so far has been GSON.

Here are more good choices:

• Jackson (Github) -- powerful data binding (JSON to/from POJOs), streaming (ultra fast), tree model (convenient for untyped access)
• Flex-JSON -- highly configurable serialization

EDIT (Aug/2013):

One more to consider:

• Genson -- functionality similar to Jackson, aimed to be easier to configure by developer

Or with Jackson:

String json = "...";
ObjectMapper m = new ObjectMapper();
Set<Product> products = m.readValue(json, new TypeReference<Set<Product>>() {});