How to serialize Java primitives using Jersey REST

Question

In my application I use Jersey REST to serialize complex objects. This works quite fine. But there are a few method which simply return an int or boolean.

Jersey can't handle primitive types (to my knowledge), probably because they're no annotated and Jersey has no default annotation for them. I worked around that by creating complex types like a RestBoolean or RestInteger, which simply hold an int or boolean value and have the appropriate annotations.

Isn't there an easier way than writing these container objects?

Answer 1

Have a look at Genson.It helped me a lot with a similar problem.With Genson you could use generics like int,boolean, lists and so on...Here is a quick example.

@GET
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response getMagicList() {
    List<Object> objList = new ArrayList<>();
    stringList.add("Random String");
    stringList.add(121); //int
    stringList.add(1.22); //double
    stringList.add(false); //bolean

    return Response.status(Status.OK).entity(objList).build();
}

This will produce a valid JSON witch can be retrieved very simple like this:

    Client client = Client.create();
    WebResource webResource = client.resource("...path to resource...");
    List objList = webResource.accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON).get(ArrayList.class);
    for (Object obj : objList) {
        System.out.println(obj.getClass());
    }

You will see that Genson will help you decode the JSON on the client side also and output the correct class for each.