Besides the Jettision JAXB adapter for JSON, Resteasy also support integration with the Jackson project. Many users find the output from Jackson much much nicer than the Badger format or Mapped format provided by Jettison. Jackson lives at http://jackson.codehaus.org. It allows you to easily marshal Java objects to and from JSON. It has a Java Bean based model as well as JAXB like APIs. Resteasy integrates with the JavaBean model as described at this url: http://jackson.codehaus.org/Tutorial.

While Jackson does come with its own JAX-RS integration. Resteasy expanded it a little. To include it within your project, just add this maven dependency to your build.

    <repository>
       <id>jboss</id>
       <url>>http://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/</url>
    </repository>

       ...
    <dependency>
       <groupId>org.jboss.resteasy</groupId>
       <artifactId>resteasy-jackson-provider</artifactId>
       <version>2.3.3.Final</version>
    </dependency>
 

The first extra piece that Resteasy added to the integration was to support "application/*+json". Jackson would only accept "application/json" and "text/json" as valid media types. This allows you to create json-based media types and still let Jackson marshal things for you. For example:

        
@Path("/customers")
public class MyService {

   @GET
   @Produces("application/vnd.customer+json")
   public Customer[] getCustomers() {}
}

    

Another problem that occurs is when you are using the Resteasy JAXB providers alongside Jackson. You may want to use Jettision and JAXB to output your JSON instead of Jackson. In this case, you must either not install the Jackson provider, or use the annotation @org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.providers.NoJackson on your JAXB annotated classes. For example:

        

    @XmlRootElement
    @NoJackson
    public class Customer {...}

    @Path("/customers")
    public class MyService {

       @GET
       @Produces("application/vnd.customer+json")
       public Customer[] getCustomers() {}
    }
    
    

If you can't annotate the JAXB class with @NoJackson, then you can use the annotation on a method parameter. For example:

        

        @XmlRootElement
        public class Customer {...}

        @Path("/customers")
        public class MyService {

           @GET
           @Produces("application/vnd.customer+json")
           @NoJackson
           public Customer[] getCustomers() {}

           @POST
           @Consumes("application/vnd.customer+json")
           public void createCustomer(@NoJackson Customer[] customers) {...}
        }