> Gson and Jackson require you to write EJB-style objects to get automatic serialization Not the case. I successfully used Jackson combined with Lombok to achi

> Gson and Jackson require you to write EJB-style objects to get automatic serialization Not the case. I successfully used Jackson combined with Lombok to achieve some really nice DRY class definitions that Just Worked with Jackson. It took a little figuring out and a couple bugfixes to Jackson but it worked. That said, part of the hassle was that I insisted on being able to do this with @Wither so we could have the objects be immutable too. Then you can write stuff roughly like @Value public final class Thing { String name; int age; boolean boiling; } Although IIRC I had to use some other random set of lombok annotations instead of @Value to get it to work right with Jackson (this was a while ago, don't recall details) > The problem with this approach is that you've completely abdicated the power of the type system to ensure that your objects are valid. Yeah, this was a big problem with my approach. The other choice would have been to use @Builders instead of @Withers. Then you get a little more boilerplate (having to type .build()), but you can guarantee the built objects meet consistency requirements. (In retrospect, I doubt I chose the right tradeoff there)