JSON at Work

Chapter 4. JSON in Java

We’ve shown how to use JSON with JavaScript and Ruby on Rails, and we’ll now move to Java, our third and final platform for this book. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Performing Java/JSON serialization/deserialization with Jackson

• Working with Java Objects and JSON

• Using JSON with JUnit

• Making RESTful API calls and testing the results with JUnit and JsonUnit

• Building a small JSON-based API with Spring Boot

In our examples, we’ll make RESTful API calls to work with the data we deployed on json-server in the previous chapter. We’ll then move to create a more realistic JSON-based Web API. Before we develop a RESTful API, we need to start with the basics of Java serialization/deserialization with JSON, and then add more complexity.

Java and Gradle Setup

This chapter uses Gradle for building source and test code. If you haven’t installed Java and Gradle, go to Appendix A and see “Install the Java Environment” and “Install Gradle”. After that, you will have a basic environment that enables you to run the examples.

Gradle Overview

Gradle leverages the concepts from earlier Java-based build systems—Apache Ant and Maven. Gradle is widely used and provides the following functionality for Java projects:

• Project structure (a common/standard project directory structure)

• Dependency Management (for JAR files)

• A common build process

The gradle init utility initializes a project by creating a core directory structure and some initial implementations for ...