What is GSON 🙇🏻‍♂️❓ JSON vs GSON

GSON is a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation. It can also be used to convert a JSON string to an equivalent Java object. GSON can work👷🏻‍♀️ with arbitrary Java objects including pre-existing objects that you do not🚫 have source-code of. while JSON is a data format that is human-readable and supported by a wide variety of languages.

There are a few open-source projects that can convert Java objects to JSON. However, most of them require🎐 that you place Java annotations in your classes; something that you can not do if you do not have access🦻 to the source-code. Most also do not fully support the use of Java Generics. GSON considers both of these as very important design goals.

Objective🧚🏻‍♂️

• Provide simple toJson() and fromJson() methods to convert Java objects to JSON and vice-versa
• Allow pre-existing unmodifiable objects to be converted to and from JSON
• Extensive support of Java Generics
• Allow custom representations for objects
• Support arbitrarily complex objects (with deep inheritance hierarchies and extensive use of generic types)

Advantage ☘🛐

Standardized − GSON is a standardized library that is managed by Google.

Efficient − It is a reliable, fast, and efficient extension to the Java standard library. Optimized − The library is highly optimized.

Support Generics − It provides extensive support for generics.

Supports complex inner classes − It supports complex objects with deep inheritance hierarchies.

Download/Integrating 🧩

Gradle🐘:

dependencies {
  implementation 'com.google.code.gson:gson:2.8.6'
}

Maven 🌿:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.google.code.gson</groupId>
  <artifactId>gson</artifactId>
  <version>2.8.6</version>
</dependency>

Gson jar downloads are available from Maven Central.

Learn More 👇🏻 —

Gson User Guide — gson (google.com)