Jackson is a group of data processing tools highlighted by its streaming JSON parser and generator library. Not needing to add annotations makes for simpler implementation and can even be a requirement if you don’t have access to your source code.
It provides the added benefit of full support for Java Generics, and it doesn’t require you to annotate your classes. GSON is a Java library that converts Java Objects into JSON and vice versa. It’s meant to be a lightweight and simple library that still performs at a high level. JSON.simple is a Java toolkit for encoding and decoding JSON text. All of these libraries are popularly used for JSON processing in a Java environment, and were chosen according to their popularity in Github projects. JSON.simple vs GSON vs Jackson vs JSONP For the benchmark tests, we looked at four major JSON libraries for Java: JSON.simple, GSON, Jackson, and JSONP. We ran a benchmark test to see how fast four of the most popular JSON libraries for Java parse different sizes of files.
Picking the right one for your environment can be critical. Microservices and distributed architectures often use JSON for transporting these kinds of files, as it is the de facto format for web APIs. But the differences add up, as often you need to parse lots of small files in rapid succession during times of heavy traffic. Small files come up all the time as incoming requests at high throughput, and parsing them happens quickly, so the differences in performance may not seem to be a big deal at first. Given the size of these files, you can be looking at significant differences in parsing speed between libraries. This is a scenario that is common in data processing applications running in Hadoop or Spark clusters. JSON is often used to transport and parse big files. We often don’t think about the JSON libraries we use, but there are some differences between them.
JSON is the accepted standard these days for transmitting data between servers and web applications. Which JSON library for Java can parse JSON files the fastest?