Parsing JSON Object in Java [duplicate]

Answer 1

There are many JSON libraries available in Java.

The most notorious ones are: Jackson, GSON, Genson, FastJson and org.json.

There are typically three things one should look at for choosing any library:

1. Performance
2. Ease of use (code is simple to write and legible) - that goes with features.
3. For mobile apps: dependency/jar size

Specifically for JSON libraries (and any serialization/deserialization libs), databinding is also usually of interest as it removes the need of writing boiler-plate code to pack/unpack the data.

For 1, see this benchmark: https://github.com/fabienrenaud/java-json-benchmark I did using JMH which compares (jackson, gson, genson, fastjson, org.json, jsonp) performance of serializers and deserializers using stream and databind APIs. For 2, you can find numerous examples on the Internet. The benchmark above can also be used as a source of examples...

Quick takeaway of the benchmark: Jackson performs 5 to 6 times better than org.json and more than twice better than GSON.

For your particular example, the following code decodes your json with jackson:

public class MyObj {

    private List interests;

    static final class Interest {
        private String interestKey;
    }

    private static final ObjectMapper MAPPER = new ObjectMapper();
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        MyObj o = JACKSON.readValue("{\"interests\": [{\"interestKey\": \"Dogs\"}, {\"interestKey\": \"Cats\" }]}", MyObj.class);
    }
}

Let me know if you have any questions.