Friday, April 06, 2012

Notes on upgrading Jackson from 1.9 to 2.0

If you have existing code that uses Jackson version 1.x, and you would like to see how to upgrade to 2.0, there isn't much documentation around yet; although Jackson 2.0 release page does outline all the major changes that were made.

So let's try to see what kind of steps are typically needed (note: this is based on Jackson 2.0 upgrade experiences by @pamonrails -- thanks Pierre!)

0. Pre-requisite: start with 1.9

At this point, I assume code to upgrade works with Jackson 1.9, and does not use any deprecated interfaces (many methods and some classes were deprecated during course of 1.x; all deprecated things went away with 2.0). So if your code is using an older 1.x version, the first step is usually to upgrade to 1.9, as this simplifies later steps.

1. Update Maven / JAR dependencies

The first thing to do is to upgrade jars. Depending on your build system, you can either get jars from Jackson Download page, or update Maven dependencies. New Maven dependencies are:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-annotations</artifactId>
  <version>2.0.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-core</artifactId>
  <version>2.0.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency> <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId> <artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId> <version>2.0.0</version> </dependency>

The main thing to note is that instead of 2 jars ("core", "mapper"), there are now 3: former core has been split into separate "annotations" package and remaining "core"; latter contains streaming/incremental parser/generator components. And "databind" is a direct replacement of "mapper" jar.

Similarly, you will need to update dependencies to supporting jars like:

  • Mr Bean: com.fasterxml.jackson.module / jackson-module-mrbean
  • Smile binary JSON format: com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat / jackson-dataformat-smile
  • JAX-RS JSON provider: com.fasterxml.jackson.jaxrs / jackson-jaxrs-json-provider
  • JAXB annotation support ("xc"): com.fasterxml.jackson.module / jackson-module-jaxb-annotations

these, and many many more extension modules have their own project pages under FasterXML Git repo.

2. Import statements

Since Jackson 2.0 code lives in Java packages, you will need to change import statements. Although most changes are mechanical, there isn't strict set of mappings.

The way I have done this is to simply use an IDE like Eclipse, and remove all invalid import statements; and then use Eclipse functionality to find new packages. Typical import changes include:

  • Core types: org.codehaus.jackson.JsonFactory/JsonParser/JsonGenerator -> com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonFactory/JsonParser/JsonGenerator
  • Databind types: org.codehaus.jackson.map.ObjectMapper -> com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper
  • Standard annotations: org.codehaus.jackson.annotate.JsonProperty -> com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonProperty

It is often convenient to just use wildcards imports for main categories (com.fasterxml.jackson.core.*, com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.*, com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.*)

3. SerializationConfig.Feature, DeserializationConfig.Feature

The next biggest change was that of refactoring on/off Features, formerly defined as inner Enums of SerializationConfig and DeserializationConfig classes. For 2.0, enums were moved to separate stand-alone enums:

  1. DeserializationFeature contains most of entries from former DeserializationConfig.Feature
  2. SerializationFeature contains most of entries from former SerializationConfig.Feature

Entries that were NOT moved along are ones that were shared by both, and instead were added into new MapperFeature enumeration, for example:

  • SerializationConfig.Feature.DEFAULT_VIEW_INCLUSION became MapperFeature.DEFAULT_VIEW_INCLUSION

4. Tree model method name changes (JsonNode)

Although many methods (and some classes) were renamed here and there, mostly these were one-offs. But one area where major naming changes were done was with Tree Model -- this because 1.x names were found to be rather unwieldy and unnecessarily verbose. So we decided that it would make sense to try to do a "big bang" name change with 2.0, to get to a clean(er) baseline.

Changes made were mostly of following types:

  • getXxxValue() changes to xxValue(): getTextValue() -> textValue(), getFieldNames() -> fieldNames() and so on.
  • getXxxAsYyy() changes to asYyy(): getValueAsText() -> asText()

5. Miscellaneous

Some classes were removed:

  • CustomSerializerFactory, CustomDeserializerFactory: should instead use Module (like SimpleModule) for adding custom serializers, deserializers

6. What else?

This is definitely an incomplete list. Please let me know what I missed, when you try upgrading!

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