Java JSON serialization - best practice

Solution 1:

Are you tied to this library? Google Gson is very popular. I have myself not used it with Generics but their front page says Gson considers support for Generics very important.

Solution 2:

As others have hinted, you should consider dumping org.json's library. It's pretty much obsolete these days, and trying to work around its problems is waste of time.

But to specific question; type variable T just does not have any information to help you, as it is little more than compile-time information. Instead you need to pass actual class (as 'Class cls' argument), and you can then create an instance with 'cls.newInstance()'.

Solution 3:

Have your tried json-io (https://github.com/jdereg/json-io)?

This library allows you to serialize / deserialize any Java object graph, including object graphs with cycles in them (e.g., A->B, B->A). It does not require your classes to implement any particular interface or inherit from any particular Java class.

In addition to serialization of Java to JSON (and JSON to Java), you can use it to format (pretty print) JSON:

String niceFormattedJson = JsonWriter.formatJson(jsonString)