The Boy Wonders

A partner recently provided a useful HTTP-based API for me at short notice.

The API returned simple JSON representations of the current state of various events they had periodically ingested from our REST APIs.

A decision they made was to use "yes"/"no" values in the response, rather than booleans e.g.

{
...
	"exists": "yes",
	"has_ended": "no"
...
}

I had written a Spring Social-based API client to interact with their API but wanted to deserialize their API response representation into a POJO that followed Java convention.

Jackson is a great Java library for processing JSON data format. It’s quite straightforward to use it to solve a problem like the above with a custom JsonDeserializer.

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code java jackson

Our team recently built a Spring MVC 3.1 application for a web service API. We had used the traditional XML-based configuration but I wanted to see how easy would it be to migrate a Spring application from an XML-based to a Java annotation-based configuration.

I referenced three great resources for this migration:

• @baeldung’s excellent Bootstrapping a web application with Spring 3.1 and Java based Configuration series
• @doughaber’s post, Pagination with Spring MVC, Spring Data and Java Config, included some great “gotchas”, especially around web tier configuration
• @cbeam and @rstoya05’s presentation, Configuration Enhancements in Spring 3.1, laid out in terrific detail how Spring configuration has evolved and how most XML configurations could be achieved through Java annotations

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code java spring