The following example demonstrate how to serialize and deserialize Java object to JSON file. The Jackson’s ObjectMapper class provides writeValue(File, Object) and readValue(File, Class<T>) methods which allow us to write an object into JSON file and read JSON file into an object respectively.

package org.kodejava.example.jackson;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

public class ObjectToJsonFile {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Artist artist = new Artist();
        artist.setId(1L);
        artist.setName("The Beatles");

        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

        File file = new File("artist.json");
        try {
            // Serialize Java object info JSON file.
            mapper.writeValue(file, artist);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        try {
            // Deserialize JSON file into Java object.
            Artist newArtist = mapper.readValue(file, Artist.class);
            System.out.println("newArtist.getId() = " + newArtist.getId());
            System.out.println("newArtist.getName() = " + newArtist.getName());
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

The result of the code snippet are:

newArtist.getId() = 1
newArtist.getName() = The Beatles

Maven Dependencies

<!-- http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/fasterxml/jackson/core/jackson-databind/2.8.6/jackson-databind-2.8.6.jar -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
    <version>2.8.6</version>
</dependency>

In the following example we will convert JSON string to Java object using ObjectMapper class from the Jackson library. This class provides a method readValue(String, Class<T>) which will deserialize a JSON string into Java object. The first argument to the method is the JSON string and the second parameter is the result type of the conversion.

package org.kodejava.example.jackson;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;

import java.io.IOException;

public class JsonToObject {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String json = "{\"id\": 1, \"name\": \"The Beatles\"}";

        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        try {
            Artist artist = mapper.readValue(json, Artist.class);
            System.out.println("Artist = " + artist);

            System.out.println("artist.getId() = " + artist.getId());
            System.out.println("artist.getName() = " + artist.getName());
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

The code snippet above will print to following output:

Artist = Artist{id=1, name='The Beatles'}
artist.getId() = 1
artist.getName() = The Beatles

Maven Dependencies

<!-- http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/fasterxml/jackson/core/jackson-databind/2.8.6/jackson-databind-2.8.6.jar -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
    <version>2.8.6</version>
</dependency>