Jackson extension

Introduction

This extension provides and integration of Restlet with Jackson. Jackson is a fast library to serialize objects to JSON and back again.

Usage instructions

The extension comes with a JacksonRepresentation that can either:

• wrap a Java object to serialize as JSON
• wrap a JSON representation to parse as a Java object

It also provides a plugin for the ConverterService which will automatically serialize and deserialize your Java objets returned by annotated methods in ServerResource subclasses.

Here is an example server resource:

import org.restlet.Server;
import org.restlet.data.Protocol;
import org.restlet.resource.Get;
import org.restlet.resource.Put;
import org.restlet.resource.ServerResource;

public class TestServer extends ServerResource {

    private static volatile Customer myCustomer = Customer.createSample();

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        new Server(Protocol.HTTP, 8182, TestServer.class).start();
    }

    @Get
    public Customer retrieve() {
        return myCustomer;
    }

    @Put
    public void store(Customer customer) {
        myCustomer = customer;
    }

}

Here is the matching client resource:

import org.restlet.resource.ClientResource;
import org.restlet.resource.ResourceException;

public class TestClient {

    /**
     * @param args
     * @throws ResourceException
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

        ClientResource cr = new ClientResource("http://localhost:8182");

        // Retrieve a representation
        Customer customer = cr.get(Customer.class);
        System.out.println(customer);

        // Update the target resource
        customer.setFirstName("John");
        customer.setLastName("Doe");
        cr.put(customer);

        // Retrieve the updated version
        customer = cr.get(Customer.class);
        System.out.println(customer);
    }

}

Note that our Customer and Address classes are just regular serializable beans, with no special parent classes and no special annotations.

What is nice is that the automatically generated JSON representations can be customized via Jackson annotations on the serialized beans. More details on annotations are available in Jackson documentation.

For additional details, please consult the Javadocs.