Overview

This is a multi-module umbrella project for Jackson standard binary dataformat backends.

Dataformat backends are used to support format alternatives to JSON, using general-purpose Jackson API. Formats included allow access using all 3 API styles (streaming, databinding, tree model).

For Jackson 2.x this is done by sub-classing Jackson core abstractions of:

• All backends sub-class JsonFactory, which is factory for:
  • JsonParser for reading data (decoding data encoding in supported format)
  • JsonGenerator for writing data (encoding data using supported format)
• Starting with 2.10 there is also sub-class of ObjectMapper (like CBORMapper, SmileMapper) for all formats, mostly for convenience
• Jackson 2.10 also added "Builder" style construction for above-mentioned factories, mappers.

Status

Binary formats supported

Currently included backends are:

• Avro (Avro format)
• CBOR (CBOR format)
• Ion (Ion format)
• Protobuf (Protobuf format)
• Smile (Smile format)

License

All modules are licensed under Apache License 2.0.

Maven dependencies

To use these format backends Maven-based projects, use following dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.dataformat</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-dataformat-[FORMAT]</artifactId>
  <version>2.13.0</version>
</dependency>

where [FORMAT] is one of supported modules (avro, cbor, smile etc)

Development

Maintainers

• Author: Tatu Saloranta (@cowtowncoder)
• Active Maintainers:
  • Michael Liedtke (@mcliedtke) (Ion backend)

You may at-reference them as necessary but please keep in mind that all maintenance work is strictly voluntary (no one gets paid to work on this or any other Jackson components) so there is no guarantee for timeliness of responses.

Branches

master branch is for developing the next major Jackson version -- 3.0 -- but there are active maintenance branches in which much of development happens:

• 2.14 is for developing the next 2.x version
• 2.13 and 2.12 are for backported fixes for 2.13/2.12 versions (respectively)

Older branches are usually not changed but are available for historic reasons. All released versions have matching git tags (jackson-dataformats-binary-2.10.3).

Note that since individual format modules used to live in their own repositories, older branches (before 2.8) and tags do not exist in this repository.

Other Jackson binary backends

In addition to binary format backends hosted by FasterXML in this repo, there are other known Jackson backends for binary data formats. For example:

• bson4jackson for BSON
• EXIficient for Efficient XML Interchange
• jackson-dataformat-msgpack for MessagePack (aka MsgPack) format

More

See Wiki for more information (javadocs).