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Joao Marques
Joao Marques

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Why Do We Still Need Jackson or Gson in Java?

Alright, let’s talk about something that’s been bugging me for ages: JSON handling in Java. Why do we still need libraries like Jackson or Gson for something so basic? Seriously, it’s 2025... shouldn’t parsing and serializing JSON be a built-in feature by now?

The Eternal Setup 🛠️

Every time we start a new Java project, it’s the same story. Add Jackson or Gson to the dependencies, configure the object mapper, and write boilerplate code for something that feels like it should just work out of the box. Other languages have this figured out.

Why Is This Still a Thing? 🤔

JSON is the language of the web. APIs are everywhere, and nearly every Java project needs to read or parse it. So why hasn’t JSON handling become a standard part of the Java SDK? I mean, we got things like java.time for dates (finally), so why can’t we have java.json or something?

The Dream 🌟

import java.json.*;  

// Parse JSON to object  
MyObject obj = Json.parse(jsonString, MyObject.class);  

// Serialize object to JSON
String json = Json.toString(obj);  
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My opinion about this 💬
Java’s all about being enterprise-ready, right? Well, enterprises use JSON all the time. It’s high time the language embraced that and gave us native JSON support. Until then, I guess we’ll keep adding Jackson and Gson to our pom.xml and pretending it’s fine.

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